


Sense Memory

by starkraving



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Post-War, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-21 12:10:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world wasn't and Mako Mori wakes up five months later with Raleigh Becket's nightmares in her head. The problem with seeing the bad things that happened to your co-pilot during his five year exile is that, by the time you see, it's four years later and he doesn't care anymore. Mako, though, she still cares and more to the point: she is someone who saved the world from monsters... and would burn it to the ground in his name. She intends to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1AM In Tokyo

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: This work contains explicit non-consensual sexual violence. Trigger warnings apply. Comments and feedback are appreciated and mulled over and a beta reader would be awesome. Uncertain if will remain gen fic or become romantic. Shall see.

It’s 1AM in Tokyo. Raleigh Becket wakes up sick.

 

It’s how he always wakes up now, his brain seized with drift ghost flashes. He prays to a God Yancy believed in to make them go away, but medically speaking, it’s going to be a while before the synaptic paths in his brain stop burning, firing the memory of his brother’s death through his nerve endings until every inch of him is convinced of the sheeting rain, knife-cold, the screaming dark, his spine bending, his shoulders dislocating, his bones splintering inside him, _ohgodplease_ – and he wakes up in his own skin.

 

Raleigh sits up, rolls over off his sleeping mat and presses his cheek into the hardwood floor, shaking, naked, skin sticky with panic and pain.

 

“Yancy.” He presses his palms into his face, lets his shoulders seize up, shakes jerking through him in a way he knows is bad, but he lets it take him, saying his big brother’s name over and over into the creases of his hands until the syllables become a mantra. There is saline on his tongue, bile in the back of his throat. “Yancy… Yancy… Yancy…”

 

He’s not praying to God, Raleigh knows.

 

It’s a long time before he finds the willpower to stand up and find his clothes in the dark, fingers rifling over the dusty creases of his fatigues, his dog-tags jangling quietly from its chain around his neck. He stops dressing a couple times to breathe, fumbles for his duffle and blindly pops two pills for the pain that’s only partially his. Then he sits on his knees and waits for his body to stop recollecting his brother’s death.

 

When the aches in his bones are his own, finally, he pulls on his pants, finds a shirt, his jacket, his wallet, his boots by the door. Then he locks the door behind him and descends the narrow staircase to the street outside. It smells like the ocean, dirt, and fish. A couple miles out the ragged skyline of the anti-Kaiju wall blocks out the horizon toward the sea. In the morning, a bus will come to the ramshackle collection of harbor hostels and motels out here and pick up the muddy throng of day workers for the wall.

 

Night work pays triple. This is because the death rate is also triple at night.

 

Raleigh is going to work nights. He has decided this, but every night when the bus comes for the evening crew, it comes, then goes without him. He doesn’t know why. Sometimes he thinks it’s because there’s too much of Yancy burned into his skull, holding his little brother back from this ledge he keeps edging toward. Raleigh closes his eyes and thinks what he’d give to have Yancy back, what non-vital limbs he would amputate to hold his brother again and fucking let that Knifehead bastard kill them both like it was supposed to.

 

The bars never close by the Wall.

 

Raleigh finds his way to the cheapest sake and gin joint just outside the docking yards – ignores a white-painted shrine-like structure near the water. The wall brings people from all over the world so which iteration of crazy this gaggle might be is nothing Raleigh cares to figure. They come in all flavors, ethnicities, classes, and backgrounds but their unifying factor is that they think the Kaiju are harbingers of God’s holy wrath.

 

He supposes they aren’t really wrong about the harbingers of doom part, Raleigh just isn’t convinced God has anything to do with it.

 

The bar’s crowded. Elbow to elbow welders and Wall-jockeys. Raleigh is considering another bar when a large German fellow spots him in the door and signals him over. Raleigh doesn’t know the man’s name, but he rents the room at the end of the hall and, one time, Raleigh helped him out in a bar fight. He gives Raleigh his seat at the bar, thumps him on the shoulder leaves him to it. The affection Raleigh feels for this stranger is stronger than it should be. He’s not sure how to thank someone for leaving him the fuck alone in such a nice way.

 

Raleigh’s Japanese is pretty terrible. He orders a small bottle of sake and fucks up his numeric counters when he also orders shots of what tastes like turpentine. He’s seven shots in and closing his tab when the bartender places a glass of Fireball in front of him.

 

“This isn’t mine,” he says.

 

“That’s because it’s on me.”

 

Raleigh looks over his shoulder. He doesn’t know the man who’s bought him the drink, but the man who’s bought the drink seems to know him – it’s in the way he studies Raleigh’s face when he turns around, in the lean of his smile. He’s a white dude, not Japanese, about Raleigh’s height and dressed in jeans and a dirty work jacket. Looks like he’s just come off the wall.

 

“Sorry, who are you?”

 

“Name’s Marco.” He’s got an American accent. “I work the same section of Wall as you do. See you in here a lot.”

 

Raleigh rolls that line over in his head, feels the weight of it. Doesn’t feel like a lie. That said, he’s never seen this guy before. Also, it’s been so long since he’s had a conversation with anyone, Raleigh isn’t sure how to respond to someone looking for a drinking buddy so he just picks up the Fireball, tips it at Marco, and downs it.

 

“Thanks.” He offers his hand. “I’m Raleigh.”

 

Marco shakes his hand. It’s soft and he holds on for about two seconds too long. “Nice to meet you.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

“Pardon?”

 

Raleigh turns back to the bar and rifles through his wallet for the appropriate amount of yen. “You’re not a fucking Wall worker, Marco.” He places the bills under the glass of Fireball and nods to the barkeep, turns around to square off with the other man. He’s too tired and drunk for this. “So what do you want?”

 

“To talk.”

 

“No. I’m not here to talk to people I’m here to work. So leave me alone.”

 

“Mr. Becket, I just want a moment of your time.”

 

Raleigh’s skin prickles, his teeth set. “Get away from me.” He shoulders past Marco, out the door, feels the man follow him. “I said back off. Keep following me and see what happens, Kaiju-fucker. I’m not fucking talking to you.”

 

“You’re a Ranger, Raleigh Becket.” Marco has abandoned his pretense of friendliness, assumed the hostility of both a man embarrassed by his screw up and one with a mission. The latter part is what worries Raleigh. “All Rangers will have to answer to God one day.”

 

“Well, then that’s between me and God, isn’t it. Stop following me.”

 

“You’ve been touched by God, Becket.”

 

“Jesus Christ…”

 

“The Kaiju are here to punish our arrogance and none are more so than the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and its Rangers.” Marco has developed a kind of earnest mania now. Raleigh is far too drunk for this Kaiju groupie bullshit. He’d been sure no one in Tokyo would recognize a disgraced American Jaeger pilot, much less the Ice Box washout from Anchorage. Raleigh turns up the collar of his jacket, stuffs his hands in his pockets and turns down an alley, aiming for the main thoroughfare toward the hostel shantytown. It’s starting to rain. “Your kind is paying for their hubris. Three more Jaegers have fallen.”

 

Raleigh keeps walking.

 

“Your brother is in hell, Becket, for his sins.”

 

Raleigh stops walking.

 

Marco, pleased, continues, “You and your brother were the first of many. All the Jaegers will fall. All they are doing is further damning humanity.” Raleigh turns around. “It is not too late.” Raleigh walks back toward Marco. “You can repent.” Raleigh is in arm’s reach. “That’s why I’m here. If you would just –”

 

Raleigh punches the man in the throat and half collapses his windpipe. He doesn’t say anything. There aren’t words for the kinetic holocaust that lights up his head when Marco mentioned his brother so he just stands there and watches Marco fall over and fail to breathe, then makes no move whatsoever to help. He just stands there while the rain sheets down from the roof, dumping water on his shoulders until he’s soaked. He’s in mud boiling up to his ankles. His eyes are hot.

 

“Don’t…” he says. “Don’t ever… you…”

 

He sways. Startled, Raleigh corrects his balance, blinks and stands still. Marco is still clutching his throat on the ground. Raleigh’s body pulls to the left and his right shoulder thumps into the wall. His tongue feels numb, his whole face. Punching Marco, a very light and controlled strike actually, has suddenly stripped him of every ounce of energy in his body. He shoves away from the wall, immediately starts down the alley toward the main street. He is not this drunk.

 

_Drugged me. He fucking drugged me._

 

Raleigh doesn’t have time to be appalled because he’s trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other when he can no longer feel his extremities. It’s raining so hard the water runs in his mouth, in his eyes. He can’t feel his hand on the wall. Panic rises through him, from his balls to the back of his throat because if he does not get to the main street…

 

 _He’ll kill you_. It’s Yancy’s voice. _They’ll kill you like the team in Brazil. You need to get out of here, little brother._

 

Raleigh staggers, swears. Jesus fuck, he can’t feel his fucking legs. He looks over his shoulder. There are people coming up the alley. One of them is helping Marco to his feet. The others start running down the alley. Raleigh shoves away from the wall and breaks into a sprint, clips a trash bin, knocks over a rack of shovels, and nearly falls on his face, hands sinking in the mud. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck…

 

_RUN, RALEIGH!_

 

A hand closes on his jacket. He yanks out of it and keeps running. Someone hits him, hard, tackles him at the waist into the mud. Raleigh twists, snaps the heel of his hand into his attacker’s face and feels their nose splinter. They scream and he knees them off. Rolls onto his belly, can’t stand up. There’s blood on his hands. Yancy is in his head, screaming at him to get up and run. There are men standing over him, then their boots slamming into his ribs, his back, his head and shoulders. He throws his arms overs his head, tries to yell, gets kicked in the gut and loses his wind.

 

_Yancy._

 

They’re going to kill him. He’s going to die in a fucking alley in Tokyo. Someone kicks him so hard, he slams into the foot of wall and his vision whites out. They grab him by the forearms, by the hair, yank him up right. Someone grabs his dog tags and rips them off his throat, vices a hand over his mouth and nose. He can’t breathe. Four men pin him up against the wall, arms against the siding. The man smothering him has one hand on his shoulder, the other over his face, his knee in Raleigh’s crotch, crushing him to the wall.

 

_Yancy, I’m sorry._

 

The man smothering him is very calm. “Shh,” he says.

 

Raleigh jerks, tries to bite through the bastard’s glove, gets a mouthful of mud.

 

“Shhhh.”

 

His eyes are burning. Rainwater running into his face. His lungs are bursting in his chest, his throat rupturing, his veins laced with battery acid. He can’t breathe. He can’t move.

 

_Yancy…_

 

He blacks out.

 

\---

 

 

Someone throws water in his face. Raleigh jolts, the ice water hitting his skin like liquid electricity, shocking his system awake and that first gasp of air is so free it’s orgasmic. Oxygen dowsing his system. He can’t see anything. There’s something over his face, a strip of cloth knotted so tight it’s pressing into the lids of his eyes. He’s lying on a mat and he’s immediately aware that someone has cuffed his wrists and ankles. Panic seizes every inch of him, flaying Raleigh’s calm to nothing before he forces himself to lie still and breathe. Just breathe, inhale, exhale, focus on his lungs in his chest rising and falling.

 

“Are you going to kill me?”

 

He figures he’ll just ask.

 

No one says anything. He can hear people walking around him, feet on hardwood floors, eyes on him. He’s on his back, his arms cuffed behind him up in the small of his back. He tugs experimentally, trying to curl his legs, finds resistance. He relaxes. He’s barefoot, still soaked, it’s not been very long then. The room is humid and sounds big, his voice dissipating into a larger space – someone’s house? If he screams will someone hear him?

 

No, they’d have gagged him if that was the case.

 

He moves his legs again, hears the faint jangle of chain links and the metal bites into his ankles until he lays still again. He can still feel people in the room, hear them breathing.

 

“What do you want?”

 

“I am sorry.” He doesn’t recognize the voice. They have an accent he can’t identify. A man. “For what Marco said about your brother.”

 

“Fuck you. If you’re going to kill me, then just fucking do it. The Kaiju will kill you like everyone else, buddy. Don’t talk about my brother.”

 

A woman speaks this time, from his right. “We aren’t here to kill you, Ranger.”

 

_Oh no._

 

“Let me go.”

 

“No.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

No answer. Then he hears someone step off the hardwood onto the mat with him. Raleigh doesn’t move, just lies there, feeling the air shift as another person moves to kneel beside him. He feels them raise their hand, senses the heat of their arm in the dead air right before they lay their  hand on his bicep, pushing his sleeve up… running their fingers over the scars there – three in a line, like claw marks.

 

“I didn’t get those from the Kaiju.” Raleigh’s voice is calmer than he actually is. He’s fucking terrified. He keeps his tone flat. “I got those from the Jaeger crash. Your monster-god-bullshit never touched me.”

 

The person touching him ignores him. Fingertips touch his cheek.

 

“I’ve got friends. They’ll be looking for me.” It’s a lie. They don’t even acknowledge him. The person touching his face reaches down and grasps the waistband of his fatigues, unsnaps the top. “No.” Someone else walks onto the mat and grabs his pants at the knees while the first person grabs his shoulders and pins Raleigh down. “NO!”

 

The second person pulls, the waist of his pants jerks down to the middle of his hips, then his thighs. Raleigh bucks up, squeezes his knees together, trying to keep them from undressing him, do something to stop them. No. God, no, no. His pants are around his ankles, his boxers around his knees and Raleigh thinks, no matter what they say, they are going to kill him after this.

 

“I’m just a fucking Jaeger pilot. I’m not… God…fuck… I’m not whatever you think…” He’s breathing too fast, hyperventilating. “Listen to me. Please, just listen to me for a minute.”

 

Naked from the waist down, Raleigh allows himself to fucking panic – the cyanide burn of terror boiling up through his guts, locking every muscle in his body. The second person, the one who undressed him, is gone. The person still holding him down also lets go of him and walks off the mat. He can hear a couple of them speaking in a language that isn’t Japanese. He lies there on his back, breathing too fast, the air cooling sweat on his bare legs and all he can think is that they’re going to torture him and he tries to think of a way to convince them to just kill him quickly.

 

His mouth is dry.

 

He tries to swallow, coughs.

 

“Do you need water?” The woman’s voice. “Answer me, pilot.”

 

 “Yeah.” He licks his lips, feels the skin split and bleed. “Yeah I feel kinda sick.”

 

“We will not uncuff you.”

 

“No, that’s fine. Just… I’m thirsty okay?” _Don’t start. Whatever you’re going to do, don’t start._ “Okay?”

 

There’s no answer. Somewhere, faintly, he hears a faucet turn on and tries to think straight. Yancy would be better at this. He could always think, always, even when he was about to die, he was trying to talk to Raleigh, tell him something and in that moment all Raleigh can think of how fucking alone he is – he’s going to die on this fucking warehouse floor and no one is going to find him and bury him. Not Mom or Dad or Yancy or Jazmine. They are all dead and no one will come looking for him. For a moment, he allows the terrible fucking crush of that to just unravel inside him, poison him entirely.

 

“Jesus Christ,” he breathes. “Jesus Christ…”

 

Someone steps onto the mat again, kneels by his head.

 

“Sit up.”

 

Raleigh pushes himself into a sitting position, hunching forward, his chin over his knees. Fingertips brush his chin, tipping his face up, the edge of a glass gently laid against his lower lip. The water is cold, tastes slightly sour, desalinated. He drinks the whole glass, aware of his captor’s breathing, how her fingers stay pressed against the underside of his jaw. When the glass is empty, she swipes her thumb across his lower lip and he feels sick again.

 

“Are you ready?”

 

“For what?”

 

“To begin.”

 

“I don’t know what we’re doing. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

 

“Do nothing.”

 

“I will fight you. If you touch me I’m going to fight you.”

 

“That is expected. It makes no difference.”

 

“Why are you doing this?” She stands ups and walks away. “Why the fuck are you doing this to me?”

 

“Scream if you want, pilot.” Someone else steps onto the mat, steps over him. “No one will hear.”

 

_Yancy. Big brother, please… if you’re in there somewhere. Please…_

 

They grab his arms and haul him up, dragging his ass off the mat then throwing him face down, pinning his shoulders to the floor as someone kicks his knees apart. He shouts in every language he knows, curses devolving into animal sounds of hatred underlain with panic and he screams when someone kneels between his knees and runs two gel-slick fingers down the cleft of his ass. They slide down from the base of his spine to the back of his balls, reaching down between his legs. The urge to vomit raced up through his body and Raleigh slams his forehead into the floor, trying to keep silent. He’d do anything to keep them from hearing him. He’d do anything to be unconscious. Someone grasps a fistful of his hair, still military crew, slightly grown out and shoves his face into the mat. The woman, he’s sure it’s the woman now, grasps Raleigh gently in her hand, then starts to stroke him from base to tip and he fractures a little.

 

“Why?” His own voice sounds wrong, like he’s in high school. “Why are you doing this?”

 

He thrashes like animal caught in a trap, hoping to hurt himself, to stop this, but they hold him fast. He breathes through his teeth, tries not to scream again as his rapist squeezes him tighter, quickening her pace, biting back a nauseous moan as blood rushes to his groin. He wants to die. He wants to die. He wants them to stop touching him. He’s terrified of what’s coming next.

 

“Stop. Please, I’m just a fucking pilot. I’m just a pilot.”

 

Are they even listening? He doesn’t even know what they think they’re doing. He squeezes his eyes shut behind the blindfold and pray for his brother’s voice in his head, anyone, anything, something to focus on other than these people making him into a ritual. He can feel himself starting to come, the orgasm gathering in his belly. He’s unbelievably hard and that’s the worst part of it; he knows it’s been almost year since anyone touched him, since some girl in Anchorage and it’s not because he wants it…

 

He bites his tongue until he tastes blood. Climaxes. Gasps as the hand between his legs continues to stroke him, again and again into the aftershocks.

 

_Please. Please, someone…_

 

The woman is running her fingers, wet from his orgasm, up into his ass again, fingertips stopping at his rectum. He tries to find the strength to struggle but he can’t fathom stopping them now. He just swallows blood and silently screams, hips jerking up as two fingers slide inside him, his whole lower body seizing with pain, a stabbing pulse from his prostate to the end of his dick. He tries not to throw up. Raleigh twitches, knees jerking as the fingers inside him press up, hard, hit something and another rush of blood to his groin makes him writhe against the mat, panting.

 

“Yancy.” He grits his teeth, his erection heavy and painful. “Yancy… God… please I can’t…”

 

_Just try to focus on my voice._

 

“It really hurts. Help me, please. Please…”

 

_I am, Raleigh. I’m here, just focus. You can do this. Just block it out, you can get through this._

 

“Okay. Okay.” One of the man is taking the woman’s place at his back, their thumb against his asshole, squeezing his right buttock. “Please don’t… don’t leave…”

 

_I won’t. I’m right here. You’re not alone, okay? I’m looking out for you._

 

Raleigh screams this time. He can’t help it. They pin him down as the man at his back leans into him, thrusts once, twice, sodomizes him slowly. He bites back the sound, swallows it and holds it in his throat as a low, inaudible tone, shaking through his bones. Someone gently strokes his hair from his temple and Raleigh feels himself drifting, finally, sliding out of his fucking skin into neural limbo, into silence. He’s ten years old and Yancy is holding his hand, walking him through the train terminal and he doesn’t know why, but his brother’s hand in his is reason enough. He has faith like one puts in God in his brother and that was before they were co-pilots. He drifts. He’s fifteen, summer, new grass, eating an apple. Yancy is tossing a baseball up and down next to him. He’s sixteen and doing twenty-five over. Yancy is yelling at him to slow the fuck down. He’s twenty-two and he’s collapsing in the snow, bleeding out through his soul and through his suit, Gispy Danger smoking dead above him, the skull of her Conn-Pod torn open.

 

“No… no… god…”

 

_I’m here, Rals. I’m still here. I’m not leaving._

 

The man on top of him spasms, comes inside Raleigh. It runs down the back of his legs, drips on the floor and his whole body hurts. His insides burn when his assailant pulls out and he can’t think. He can’t even react when another man moves to replace the first, grabbing him by the hips and dragging him off the mat.

 

“Yance, please…”

 

_Focus. Just drift, Raleigh._

 

He drifts. He’s twelve. Birthday cake. He’s thirteen. First kiss. He’s eighteen. First car accident. He’s twenty-three and he’s being fucked on the floor of a warehouse trying to imagine enough of his dead brother to make believe he’s not alone. He does not scream. He forces himself to blank out, drifts again until he’s seventeen lying in the shallows of a lake, staring up, listening to Yancy hum to himself as he skips rocks. It’s summer again and they have all summer to spend doing whatever they want. Anything they want.

 

He wakes up as someone rolls him onto his back.

 

“He’s still alive.”

 

“Think he’ll make it to a hospital?”

 

His hands are uncuffed. Someone tosses his jacket on top of him, his boots hitting the mat next to his head.

 

“That’s up to him.”

 

He drifts.  

 

 

\---

 

_“Can you see yourself going to college, Yance?”_

_“Nope. You?”_

_“Know what I can see us doing?” Yancy laughs. The sun is directly overhead, blinding. Raleigh has to hold up a hand to blot it out, see his brother on the edge of his sun-swarmed vision. “I can see us saving the world. Punching Kaiju in the face, living forever.”_

_“You still have senior year, doofus.”_

_“Yeah, but we’ll do it right? We’ll try out for the Ranger Academy and if we wash out, you go back to college and I’ll start up.”_

_“That’s your big plan?”_

_“That’s my big plan, but I can’t do it without you. So don’t puss out on me.”_

_“I won’t puss out on you, Rals.” Yancy kicks water at him. “I’ll be there.”_

 

\---

 

 

It’s 5AM in Hong Kong. Mako Mori wakes up sick. 

 

 

 

 

_tbc_


	2. 5AM Hong Kong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mako buys herself some time to process and Raleigh waits. Arguing about lunch becomes the most important thing two Jaeger pilots might do in their whole life and, eventually, Mako admits that she has not forgiven the world for what it's done to her family. There are no secrets in the drift. Mako beats up a dude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content triggers for this chapter, only references to events from last chapter and very hurtful words about microwave Mac and Cheese. Comments and feedback are very much appreciated. I love hearing thoughts and reactions. Any PM's about the story's content will be answered as I'm able.

 

\---

 

Raleigh Becket is a morning person.

 

It’s disgusting.

 

He’s got the energy of a ten-year-old on Christmas morning _every_ morning and that’s the enthusiasm with which he greets his partner at the door, right on time, 0600, looking like a golden retriever might look if you made it human and your Jaeger co-pilot. Mako is, by contrast, an early riser by discipline alone and does not share Raleigh’s beaming cheer about being awake before dawn every morning. For Raleigh, it’s Tuesday, and they have hydraulic checks, which means they have scheduled time in the drift and that would usually be something to celebrate.

 

Not today.

 

“Morning.” Mako receives a mug of coffee from Raleigh upon opening her door. He’s clearly in a good spirits, excited. She wants, more than anything, to share that excitement. “So,” he says, falling into step with her and handing her a sugar packet in the manner of a morning person who knows someone else is _not_ a morning person and is trying to be helpful. “You think Tendo will have the systems up at noon or should I do you need me before that?”

 

“Uh.” She fumbles her grip on the coffee mug, which is burning her hand. “We may have to reschedule.”

 

“Alright.” He reaches up and puts his hand on top of her head, dishevels her hair slightly. “Tokyo Reaction’s your baby. Tell me when you need me for AI checks then.”

 

“I will.” She is paralyzed by how nothing has changed at all. “Raleigh.”

 

He turns, three strides ahead of her, hands in his pockets. “Yeah?”

 

“After shift… can I talk to you?”

 

The formal request catches his attention. “Yeah, course. What’s up?”

 

Mako means to say ‘nothing important’, but she cannot. The words are ash on her tongue. Raleigh tilts his head at her and, for a moment, she thinks of just not telling him and hoping that the science of the Drift just somehow will miss this and allow her to keep this secret, like a piece of shrapnel lodged in her ribs. She aches just looking at him because, for Raleigh, nothing has changed. He’s fine. It’s Tuesday. He’s standing there blinking at her with his head at a slight angle because she’s taking too long to answer, all blond and extremely blue-eyed and American from the top of his head to the soles of his boots.

 

The dissonance between them feels alien. Mako Mori’s heart is pumping sulphuric acid, she is dying in inches, but Raleigh Becket is handing her sugar packets and had toast for breakfast this morning. For her… 1AM in Tokyo was just last night and for him – like Yancy’s death, like Anchorage, like burning alive in Gispy Danger’s Conn-Pod, like Knifehead – it’s been over four years.

 

“I’ll tell you after shift,” she says. “I want to discuss in private.”

 

Mako watches him visibly try to figure out what she could be talking about – going over the last few months in his brain, looking for some subject that needs discussing – then lets it go. “Okay. We’ll talk then.” He walks backwards away from her, points a finger at her. “But I’ll still see you in the mess?”

 

“Of course.” Mako feels the back of her eyes stinging. “I’ll see you then.”

 

He waves and turns his back on her, striding away. Watching him go is the hardest thing Mako Mori will do all morning and, once he’s turned the corner, she bends the waist and braces a hand against her knee and fights back an animal urge to scream. It is a violence that has always been in her, since the day her family died, a razorblade between her teeth. She wants to put her fist through a wall, hurl her mug against the floor and watch it explode, draw her own blood, scream, any act of destruction that might sate the hate in her heart that wants to send her out into the world with knife in hand to find the monsters in humanity and do to them what she did to the kaiju.

 

_Not my family. Not my family. How dare you. God damn you._

 

Her eyes burn and blur. Coffee drips on the floor.

 

Mako stands up straight and wipes her face with the back of her hand. She has until 1700 hours. That is how long she has before she has to tell Raleigh her brain bled his memories into her dreams and stole his right to bury this in the past. They are not friends. They are partners, co-pilots, Rangers. She does not have the luxury of lying to him because what knits their souls back to back is nothing as human or as simple as love – though she does love him, more than anything. It’s more brutal than that. If she steps into the drift with him and carries her hate and this nightmare with her, the damage she will do will be far greater.

 

She has one day. That is how long she can delay the time-table for the next hydraulic check, that’s how much time she can buy her best friend before she has to step into the drift with him and risk the R.A.B.I.T dragging them both down a hole into Tokyo again. She puts the sugar in her coffee and walks to the Shatterdome hanger.

 

\---

 

Toyko Reaction is the last Jaeger that will ever walk the earth.

 

The Breach is shut, the war-clock stopped, and in between the heartbeats of the world, humanity considers the possibility of peace. Peacetime is something Mako Mori as never known. Since her birth, humanity has been at war and in the months following KV-Day (an English-speaking term, coined after WWII’s V-Day) Mako has not stopped moving. She oversees Project Dawnbreaker. It’s a restoration program – part military contract, part post-war propaganda, mostly remembrance.

 

Tokyo Reaction was the last Mark IV in production before funding to the Jaeger program was cut in April of 2020. Due to a massive public outcry, Tokyo Reaction was not scrapped but rather put into storage in a Hokkaido as part of the national Japanese Jaeger museum where he remained, in pieces and silent until 2025. In the five years that Tokyo Reaction was housed in Hokkaido, visitors from all across Japan came to pay their respects at the feet of their last titan. Coyoto Tango, Tacit Ronin, Echo Saber – all previous Japanese models has been consigned to Oblivion Bay.

 

Tokyo Reaction was, for five years, a memorial to the dead and the dying.

 

Five months ago, Gispy Danger jumped down the throat of the Breach and closed it forever. Four months ago the Japanese government spear-headed a campaign to put Tokyo Reaction back into service as a patrol unit for a term of five to ten years. For two months Mako Mori – Tokyo’s iconic survivor, the girl who killed the monsters – became the face of Project Dawnbreaker through a massive outpouring of both public and private funding, the project was signed into action.

 

Tokyo Reaction will never be a weapon like Gispy Danger or his predecessors. He is, in reality, still a memorial. Weighing in at just 1500 tons, 77 meters tall, Reaction is the lightest fastest Jaeger ever built. Modeled after Tacit Ronin’s light armored, highly mobile frame design, Reaction is made to run and made to last, but he’s not built to fight.

 

He’s here as a guardian. The last Jaeger standing.

 

“He’s looking good.”

 

Mako turns away from her surveillance of Tokyo Reaction to find Marshal Herc Hanson standing behind her. His arm is out of its sling now and he wears the uniform of his rank, but with such disdain there is no mistaking that his position is not one that he is most willingly occupying. His face post-war is more severe than it ever was during his time as a pilot. He took no leave after KV-Day. He went to Sydney for one day to oversee his son’s memorial at the Sydney Opera House, an event for which half a million Australians turned out. The footage from that day was the coast-line filled with people, carrying black ribbons, silently holding vigil at the sea until the sun set on Sydney Harbor.

 

That was the last time Herc Hanson publically mourned his son. Now, he carries his responsibilities like a soldier carries his gun and he’s looking at Mako as a commanding officer does a subordinate.

 

“Tendo tells me you’ve rescheduled the hydraulic tests to tomorrow. You were pushing pretty hard to have the neural alignments perfect before end of month.”

 

“I know.” She doesn’t quite stand at attention, but she instinctively straightens up, folds her hands behind her back. “I am grateful for the work Tendo and our engineers are doing to accelerate the time table. I simply need time to go over the data once more.”

 

“You’ve been over that data a hundred times, Miss Mori. We’re scheduled for Reaction’s first test deployment by the end of next month.”

 

Mako nods, keeps her gaze steady. “There is something I need to do before I drift again. I am taking care of it, Marshall. I assure you, we will not fall behind schedule.”

 

“Of that, I have no doubt, Miss Mori.” Herc’s demeanor remains stern, but his tone adjusts slightly. “If this is about that business in the States last week…”

 

Last week the funerals of three separate Rangers were picketed by the Sisters of the Kaiju – a religious organization who believed that all Rangers were to be crucified by the Kaiju as false prophets. Bottles of kaiju blood were thrown into the crowd mourners, poisoning half a dozen people. Two days later, the a group of Blue Bloods, another branch of pro-kaiju reactionaries, burned Mako’s picture in front of the White House and nailed an effigy of Raleigh to a wall before police shows to break up the protest. Mako found out when a journalist waylaid her during a press-conference to ask how it felt to be a hate figure in another country.

 

She admits that, now, it does have something to do with that.

 

But damned if she will admit it to the Marshall.

 

“Marshall, my country supports me and they support Tokyo Reaction. I will not fail them. I do not care about radicals in America. The disrespect they show to their fallen Rangers and to me and Ranger Becket is shameful, but it holds no bearing here.” She does not mention her wish that the American government would arrest and publically condemn these people as criminals. In honestly, what she actually wants is to cross the sea and drop them all in a Kaiju Blue zone. “The world wants a Jaeger to watch the Pacific. They will have one.”

 

Herc nods.

 

“Glad to hear it, because you and Becket have another interview.”

 

“Sir? I thought that was next week.”

 

“Re-scheduled. Since you’re pushing back the hydraulic test, might as well get the press-time over with. Report to loading bay at 1300 hours. Bring Becket with you.” From her face, the Marshall can probably tell she’s calculating the ways in which this is a waste of her time. “Try to keep Becket from being such a smartass, yeah? The Brits are footing a pretty big chuck of change for the salvage operations in Oblivion Bay. He can smile for a camera.”

 

“I will… inform him of your wishes.”

 

“All he has to do is not literally tell him to fuck off.”

 

“With respect, if you are referring to the reporter in New York, they deserved it.” She gauges Herc’s amusement with her response before adding: “The Youtube video has over 700,000 likes, I am told.”

 

“Mori, go to mess and get fly-boy. That’s an order.”

 

“Yes, Marshall.”

 

\---

 

“That is disgusting.”

 

If Raleigh Becket is offended by her assessment of his lunch, he doesn’t let on. He just looks up at her over the top of his microwave Mac and Cheese and then, slowly, never breaking eye contact with her, takes a really big spoonful and jams it in his mouth. Then he looks at her over the spoon with an expression of open challenge. Mako sits down across from him with her own tray and side-eyes his bowl of yellow noodles with visible prejudice.

 

“You can’t say shit,” he says after a moment of intense judgment from her. “You eat cup-a-noodles.”

 

“There is nothing wrong with ramen.”

 

“Leave my Mac and Cheese alone and I will leave you all your soggy noodle cups.”

 

“It’s soup. It is, by definition, wet.”

 

“It’s also, by definition, gross.”

 

“You are wrong.”

 

Raleigh inspects her mostly empty tray, which has two apples on it. She tosses him one without warning, which he catches without looking up from her tray. He scrubs it on his sleeve before sinking his teeth into it, the crunch so loud that several people look up at him. Mako, meanwhile, uses a small penknife to cut hers into eighths and resigns herself to the stink of microwave cheese noodles while her partner picks up her clipboard and inspects it.

 

“Press meeting huh?”

 

“Marshall Hanson has told me to that you are not to tell Mister Jones to ‘literally fuck off’.” She enunciates the quote very carefully and bites into an apple slice. “I, however, am not opposed if he turns out to be as disrespectful as the American reporters from our last conference.”

 

Raleigh puts the clipboard down. “They aren’t all bad. Wouldn’t be American if there wasn’t some jackass asking bullshit questions for Fox News.” Mako gives him a silent look that disagrees entirely with him on that point. “People have the right to be idiots and I have the right to tell ‘em to fuck off. Fair’s fair.”

 

“Sure,” she says, but what she means is ‘You are wrong.’

 

Raleigh chews loudly from his side of the table. “So what’s up?”

 

“Nothing is up.”

 

“Why you pushin’ back our time in Toyko Reaction?”

 

Ah, so he hadn’t let it go easily. “There is something I need to talk to you about,” she says evenly, seeing no point in being entirely obtuse at this point. “Before we drift again. I do not want to take any chances that it will affect our performance and…” She pauses a moment, weighing her words. “...it concerns me.”

 

Raleigh is sitting forward now, arms folded on the table top, looking at her. “I can tell it concerns you. It was concerning you this morning when you brought it up and pushed back the hydraulic tests, but what is it?”

 

“Not here,” she says, picking up her cup of water.

 

“Why not?” She looks at him sharply. He just tilts his head, reading her face like he’s reading the page of a book, then sits back. “Okay then. Tonight.” He gives her a look. “If it’s a psycho-social sex boundaries thing, I’m going to laugh at you though.”

 

Mako feels instantly sick.

 

“We should go. The reporter is waiting for us.” Something in her tone makes Raleigh look up at her and she can see it in his expression before he even opens his mouth that he is going to ask her what’s wrong. She cuts him off by standing up and adding, curtly, “Don’t tell this one to fuck off, Mister Becket.”

 

He grins. When he grins, she supposes it would be erroneous to say some of the darkness around her heart seemed to crack a little, letting a small bleed of light into her soul. It would be more accurate to say his smiles makes her want to smile. He catches up with her at the end of the table and loops an arm around her shoulders, the familiar weight and shape of him seeming, suddenly, essential. The only way to describe standing next to Raleigh is like having a headache you didn’t realize was there suddenly go away.

 

Because Raleigh’s shoulders are too high for her, she loops an arm around his waist and, despite the presence of other people, turns her face into his shoulder and hugs him. His clothes smell like discount detergent and dirty copper, suggesting he’s been down with the pit crews over seeing some of Tokyo Reaction’s assembly. Her fingers dig into his side a little, pressing through the fabric into a line of muscle above his hip.

 

“Yeah, sure, nothing’s up,” he says quietly.

 

“Sorry,” she says.

 

“You sure you can’t tell me what’s goin’ on?”

 

She lets go of her co-pilot, lets the residual heat fade from her skin – like she draws power from faint the electromagnetics of his body. “I will tell you. After.”

 

Loading bay one is one of the larger shore-side garages that handles personnel shuttles and general delivery. Several work shuttles are already there, unloading a crew of welders and non-essential security personnel, taking on passengers on their way back to Hong Kong. Mako and Raleigh make their way past the collection of military drop-offs to a smaller reception area just outside the garage where several cabs, a public bus, and civilian cars are parked.

 

A man is leaning against one of the cabs and, upon spotting Mako and Raleigh, waves to the driver who accepts a fold of money through the window and drives off. Martin Jones is a 6.1 Caucasian man with a long nose, 5 o’clock shadow at 1PM, and a very short spiny haircut. There’s a Press Admittance badge on the lapel of his long wool jacket and his smile is very white, directed at Mako first, then Raleigh. He doesn’t seem to mind the wind.

 

“Miss Mori. Mister Becket.”

 

“You our journalist?” Raleigh asks, speaking over the wind a little.

 

“That’s me.” He holds out a hand and the exchanges handshakes with them both. “Nice to meet you.”

Eventually they decide a small stack of crates off to the side in bay will just have to do. Shatterdome is not really equipped for civilian visitation and Jones seems keen on keeping things ‘informal’. Mako thinks it’s odd to do an interview in a loading bay. Raleigh, of course, seems fine with it.

 

Jones has Raleigh and Mako take a seat while he sets up a small camera stand with a swivel-round screen so they can see themselves centered in the display. When the lighting and position is to his satisfaction, Jones stands off screen so the camera holds on the two pilots and begins with some opening questions about their time in the Jaeger Academy. He goes over the usual: KV-Day, what was going through their minds after the Jaeger program was decommissioned, the fight itself, any hard feelings to the officials who cut funding, etc.

 

They’ve heard most of this before. Mako discretely checks her watch.

 

“So, both of you have been stationed in Hong Kong since KV-Day. Almost continuously, is that right?”

 

“The Hong Kong Shatterdome is the only operational staging area for Tokyo Reaction’s restoration,” says Mako. Raleigh, beside her, leans back against a crate behind him, hands folded across his stomach. “We will likely operate out of Hong Kong until such a time as another staging area is available. All Jaeger pilots are required to live on base while on active duty.”

 

“And Mako here is the head of the restoration project, so we kinda need her.”

 

Jones smiles. “Well, it’s like they say: home is where ever the Jaegers are for a Jaeger pilot. And you, Raleigh, not been back to the states since the victory tours?”

 

“Yeah, I’m a bit busy to be catching rays back in Alaska.”

 

“So have you heard about the statements issued online? From the Blue Blood Network?”

 

Raleigh arches a brow. He’s really good at that. “Uhh, the guys who burned stuff in the President’s lawn a few weeks ago?” His tone says everything about what he thinks about lanw-burning crazies. “No, uh, I don’t really follow that kinda stuff. Sorry.”

 

“And their threat?” Raleigh’s next look is less pitying. An arctic cold passing into his eyes at the persistence on an obviously inappropriate topic and Mako is already starting to sit warily forward. Jones remains conversational. “They’ve promised to…” He glances at something in her notes. “…’nail Raleigh Becket to a cross before God.’” Raleigh stares, stunned. “I think I’ve got that right. Any response?”

 

Raleigh doesn’t get to respond. Mako is already across the space between them. She rips the notepad out of the man’s hand and kicks the camera tripod over. Jones squeaks and Mako rips his little notebook in two before grabbing him by the lapel of his jacket. Obviously not prepared for this response, Jones squawks and tries to hit Mako, who promptly hurls the bastard to the floor.  

 

“ _How dare you! How dare you come here and say these things to him!”_ She is aware she’s yelling at the British man in Japanese and corrects herself. “Get out! Get off this base immediately or I’ll have you thrown off base! How dare you speak to him this way! Why are you obsessed with these people and their horrible ideas?!”

 

“Mako!” Raleigh grabs her shoulder. “Mako, stop!”

 

“You’re crazy!” shouts Jones, abandoning his camera and running. “You crazy fucking bitch.”

 

Mako yanks out of Raleigh’s hold. “GET OUT!”

 

Jones runs like hell, not that he needed to. Raleigh grabs Mako from behind, collaring her up under her right arm to her left shoulder with one arm and hauls her backwards from the fleeing journalist. Mako elbowed Raleigh in the gut, making him grunt, but he doesn’t let go. His other arm goes around her waist and he swings her all the way around and drops her on her feet so he’s now between her and the journalist, who has made the parking lot with impressive time.

 

“Get a grip!”

 

“You heard what he said!”

 

“Yeah. I did. It was crazy bullshit, but I don’t beat up journalists on camera because they ask stupid crazy questions. Jesus, Mako.”

 

“ _They don’t get to say things like that!”_

 

“Mako.” Raleigh grabs her shoulders, looks her in the eye. _“Calm down.”_

 

Calm? What is calm? She has no conception it now because all she feels is hot, that her bones are on fire inside their housings of muscle and flesh strung so tight over the calcium structure of her skeleton that she feels she is going to shake apart. She does not move. She holds herself still, exerts every ounce of control she possesses to hold herself still in Raleigh’s hands because she knows, conceptually, that he is right. She just attacked someone, a civilian.

 

Raleigh is still gripping her shoulders, face so close she can make out the individual colors in her partner’s eyes.  “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

 

“He threatened you.”

 

“Bullshit, there have been reporters that said way worse to you,” Mako internally disagrees, no one ever said they’d kill her, “and you never freaked out like you just did. What’s going on? This about that thing you need to talk to me about?”

 

Her jaw aches from clenching her teeth. “I wanted to wait,” she says.

 

“Well, that was kind of before you attacked a dude.”

 

Mako closes her eyes, inhales slowly and lets the oxygen chill the burn in her blood, the heat seeming to diffuse through her partner’s palms where he touches her. She allows herself to bleed her rage into the ether between them, focusing on the part of her that is not just her but _them_ and feels Raleigh respond in turn. Like two radio frequencies tuning into each other and they just stand there for a full ten seconds – the time it takes the rabbit pulse of her heart to slow. She opens her eyes again.

 

“I saw something,” she says. “I drifted in my sleep and there was… a synaptic echo.”

 

The term is one of several ways to refer to ghost drift specific to memory bleed, when the mind in the neural handshake sews more than the pilot can comprehend, the mind nevertheless saw it, burns the neural pathways through the grooves of the mind and lays it in wait. Like a time bomb. All pilots experienced this at some point, latent memories unraveling in the brain during REM. Mako sees Raleigh immediately become concerned. Echoes can be serious depending on the pilot and he knows she’s never had one before.

 

“Was it Yancy?”

 

“No. I… it wasn’t Yancy.”

 

“Then what?”

 

Her eyes are burning again and she feels foolish. She doesn’t have the right to cry over this. It is not _hers._ “I saw Tokyo.” Raleigh starts to say something but she shakes her head. “No. Not that. I saw you… in Tokyo.”

 

He is uncomprehending for a moment. Her insides are knotted like a towel inside her, wringing tighter and tighter until, finally, she sees the realization move in behind his eyes and subtly changes the landscape of his expression. Watching Raleigh remember and realize is like a punch in the gut. Extreme empathy for your co-pilot is not an uncommon side effect of the drift, but Mako would give anything to be stone in that moment where she can see him realize that she _knows._

 

She is somewhat surprised when he takes her head between his hands and drops his forehead against hers. He inhales, slightly raggedly, once, then says:

 

“ _I’m sorry_.” His Japanese is much better than it used to be. She blinks, feels liquid heat run down the side of her nose. “We should talk.”

 

 

 

_tbc_


	3. 1700 Hours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mako Mori is a swordmaker's daughter and Raleigh Becket is Yancy's brother. Raleigh doesn't carry death like Mako does and he's pretty sure he never will. They talk R.A.B.I.Ts, revenge, and take Tokyo Reaction for his first test drive. Nothing goes as planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings for this chapter, only references back to previous events. Comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.

 

 

 

 

\---

 

Before Yancy died, when they were off-duty, Raleigh and his brother used to take road trips.

 

The Pacific Ocean for a pair of Jaeger pilots will always be their battleground and, though it didn’t bother Raleigh, Yancy felt better when he put a couple hundred miles of road between himself as the coastline. So, to that end, they drove out of Anchorage in a white Toyota pick-up, took the high-way into the network of American roads and chased down the sun set. The pick-up belonged to their dad, smelled like stale leather and old coffee, and all while driving it Yancy would bitch about its fucking engine, it’s fucking paint job, the fucking transmission, the goddamn hole in the goddamn upholstery, the shit-fucked cloudy headlights, everything.

 

Raleigh could not count the times he’d nodded off to his brother’s voice, talking over the local radio. “Swear to God, Rals. I swear to God if this thing breaks down on us…”

 

But it never did.

 

And Yancy never fixed the transmission, the paint job, the seats, or the headlights. He played the same Lynyrd Skynyrd cassette tape over and over, until the D-C+9-G chord progression of Sweet Home Alabama was tattooed to Raleigh’s soul like a badge and he begged his brother to turn it off and listen to some Radiohead or something for fuck’s sake. The last time they took a road trip, Yancy pulled over in the back roads of Missouri and smoked on the hood of the car, which Raleigh remembered years later only because Yancy didn’t smoke. The smell of Menthol Cools through the open window – whenever he smelled them today he saw his brother’s shoulders hunched against the evening wind.

 

Shibuya Pop is not _Sweet Home Alabama_ , not yet. And the scent of Mako’s hair is not cigarette smoke, but then again… she did not burn neural scar tissue into the core of his skull and split his goddamn mind open like Yancy did.

 

“You said we should talk.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

She starts to turn off the music but he shakes his head and she leaves it on, the single soft pod of the earbud still playing syntho-beat quietly in his ear. Mako has its sister. Laying on her side next her him, her head laid against his shoulder, legs tangled slightly with his in the unmade folds of the bed, he registers the heel of her combat boots are digging slightly into his ankle. But the weight isn’t noticeable enough to trouble her to move and Raleigh likes how far the world seems from them right now.

 

Mako’s hand moves down from its place against his collarbone to his hand at his stomach, slips her fingers through his.

 

“What happened?”

 

“Nothing.” She waits. “I drifted for most of it, woke up, passed out for a few hours.” That floor mat, cold and sticky when he woke. His own blood turned brown on the rubberized foam, dried under his fingers. “I didn’t know where I was. They’d moved me to a part of the city I’d never been to, a dock yard. Had to walk back to the road. Took me a while.” Hurt to bend down, hurt to stand, hurt to walk. Smelled. He could still smell it. “A family pulled over for me, tourists from Ume. Didn’t flag ‘em, they just saw me. Took me to a hospital.”

 

“And that was it.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Mako turns her face up and presses her forehead against his temple.

 

“I forgot about the family.” His skin feels too tight over the bones in his hands, like they dried with soap still on them. Mako says nothing, waiting but he can feel her looking up at him, the weight of her focus on every word he says and every move he makes. Her engineer’s gaze tracks the details of his body language in micro and he goes on. “The wife sat in the back of the van with me while her husband drove.” He frowns. “She gave me a juice box.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Nah.” He inhales, exhales. “It was four years ago. I just… kept goin’, left Japan, went back to the States.”

 

“You didn’t find anyone, go to anyone.”

 

“There was no one to go to, Mako.”

 

His co-pilot guides his hand up, spreads her fingers until he lines his up with hers, palm to palm. She looks at their hands for a long moment before, finally, addressing the technicality of what happened in Tokyo. “It’s a trigger point,” she says quietly. “It was beyond conscious memory for you. For me...”

 

“I trust you. You won’t chase it.”

 

“Sense memory is different, Raleigh. It is not clear, one from the other. There is no psychic distance. If I chase it…”

 

Raleigh finally rolls onto his side, so he can look his partner in the eye. He keeps hold of her hand, lays it between them. “You won’t, Mako.”

 

“I wanted to kill that man.” Raleigh waits. Mako’s expression is beyond reading, but he reads it anyway. “I wanted to kill him for talking about the Blue Bloods, Raleigh. I still do. I am so _angry_. I want to find them and punish them.” She sounds afraid and Mako never sounds afraid. Her hand tightens around his. “It’s all I think about.”

 

“That’ll pass. It’s residual.”

 

“No,” she says harshly. “It’s not. You never thought about finding them. I do. It’s me. _I_ want to kill them. _I_ want to hurt them. Me. The memory is not mine, the anger is. I cannot bring this into the drift...”

 

“Mako.” Raleigh fits his hand to the space beneath her ear, thumb against her temple, fingers in her hair. “You’d be crazy if you could sit through a bleed like that and _not_ want to kill someone. We’re fine.”

 

“I have nothing to fight,” she says, finally.

 

“I know.”

 

“What do I do?”

 

Raleigh leans over presses his mouth against her forehead, through her bangs, pulls her head against his chest and the two of them curl into one another. Her fingers under his jacket, along his back, dig into the flat of his shoulder blade, her face pressed against his neck. He is hyper aware of her heartbeat through her body, through her clothes, where she pulls too close and where she doesn’t pull close enough, where his knee falls between her legs and she hooks her ankle behind his.

 

“What do I do, Raleigh?”

 

“Gotta let it go.” He says this to the girl who carried the death of her family for eleven years into the fucking Breach with a nuclear bomb under her feet. He holds onto Mako when she tenses up, the steel edge composite of her soul utterly rejecting his words even as he says them. “You killed our monsters, Mako. Don’t go lookin’ for new ones. I don’t need revenge.”

 

“I hate them.”

 

“I know.”

 

“How can you not?”

 

“I’m pretty fucked up, Mako. I was fucked up for a really long while. By the time they got to me…” Laying in the shores of Anchorage, his drive suit burning, his brain shredded in the bone bowl of his skull _._ “…it just didn’t matter.”

 

“It matters to me.”

 

“Then pilot with me and don’t chase it. Can you do that for – Oh.”

 

Mako takes him off guard, so his tongue catches slightly against her lower lip, a trace of her breath passing over his teeth when he inhales. He corrects the angle slightly and lies comfortably beneath the weight of her kiss. She is remarkably still. He senses her focus, almost mathematical. It kind of makes him want to laugh, but the level of attention his partner is putting into just one small kiss – her mouth pressed so precisely against his – rather disables anything he has to think about it. She places her next kiss on his forehead, breaking the spell.

 

“I can let it go,” she says.

 

\---

 

The day Yancy’s Toyota finally broke down, Raleigh cried for an hour. He hadn’t cried really, about Yancy. The psychotic mania that seized him directly after his brother’s death was as much medical as it was emotional – his brain branded with sensory echoes, synaptic recall etched through the relays of his gray matter in tiny electrical veins. The PPDC medical staff dosed him into a blurry numbness for almost a month before letting him fully come out of it, giving his head time to heal from the worst of the neural-bridge feedback.

 

After he was officially discharged, nearly two months after the attack in Anchorage, Raleigh got the truck out of storage and drove it halfway across the country where it broke down on a road in Tennessee. He got it onto the shoulder, climbed out, then sat on the hood and fucking sobbed until his whole body hurt. He didn’t even try to open the hood. The truck would never start again.

 

In the end, Raleigh left that truck on the side of the road. Took the cassette tape with him.

 

\---

 

Five years ago, the last living Becket brother walked out of the Anchorage Shatterdome wearing a pair of boots that were a bit too big and a jacket that didn’t fit and it nearly killed Tendo Choi. Watching Raleigh cross the parking lot in his dead brother’s clothes – it peeled open some calcified organ in Tendo’s fucking chest and injected it with battery acid. Five years ago, he let one of his best friends walk away to die by himself. 

 

But today is Wednesday.

 

“Hey, Danger Duo, how’s the early morning treatin’ ya?”

 

Mako says something like, “Yeah, fine,” but Raleigh says, “Doin’ awesome, Tendo! What’s up?” with energy that is just not goddamn natural. He runs on Skittles, is Tendo’s personal theory, Skittles and thoughts of Disneyland or something, the happy little fuck. The Jaeger-to-LOCCENT radio is clear as a bell. “How’s Tokyo?”

 

“He’s lookin’ good. Miss Mori did all the checks… and then did them again.” He lets hang the mention of yesterday’s delay but Mori does not volunteer a more plausible explanation, choosing instead to get herself settled into Conn-Pod’s motion harness. “So you two should be all good for a hydraulic sync.”

 

“Yeah, we promise not to shoot up the place this time.”

 

“Oh no,” says Tendo grandly, picking up his third mug of coffee from the top of the control board. “Oh no, Becket, you and Miss Magic Hands will _not_ be shooting up the Shatterdome today. New failsafes. Had them custom hard-coded and built in just for Miss Mori and her ninety-eighth percentile machine-to-pilot bridge-ratio. Makes you look like a fuckin’ light-weight, Becket. That said, Mako, dear, my sunshine and stars, please don’t chase another RABIT again. It’s too early in the morning for that.

 

Mako does not laugh, her tone is perfectly professional. “Understood, Mr. Choi. I will reserve unscheduled weapons testing for afternoons only.”

 

“She’s joking right?”

 

Becket laughs.

 

“Now you both take it easy,” says Tendo, settling into his seat. Several other technicians give him thumbs up from their stations, all diagnostic programs are up and running, the whole and sum total focus of LOCCENT’s considerable computing power aimed at monitoring Tokyo Reaction and its two hero pilots. “We’re still taking it slow today. 80% neural load for now, see how biometrics look.”

 

Raleigh groans in the completely pitiable manner of the impatient and the staff in LOCCENT Control all grin. He and Mori are locked into their harnesses. Tokyo Reaction feeds their individual bio-data into an adjacent screen which spawns a series of metrics – heart rate, nervous system, body temperature, neural activity. Mako’s readings are all clear, falling easily within optimal parameters. Raleigh’s are also within operational parameters, but where Mako's biometrics are pristine arcs and bends of 'all clear', Raleigh's neurological data spikes and curves in a few places it shouldn't.

 

 “C’mon, Tendo. We go any slower and we’ll be goin’ backwards.”

 

“Hmm, 90% is as high as I’m gonna go for launch operations. Show me some strong drift and I’ll open her up.”

 

“You rock.”

 

“I know, kid. I know. Initiating drop.”

 

“Everything looking good, Choi?”

 

Herc Hanson is not wearing the uniform of a Marshall today. He probably should be, but no one is going to say a damn thing to him about it because Hercules Hanson is scary. He’s not quite Stacker Pentecost scary but he’s a very close second and while Pentecost made you want to sink into the damn floor to escape his god-like condemnation, Herc makes you feel like he’ll to pop you in the face if you irk him enough. The point was, both men could incline you to piss yourself with perfectly valid fear and the how of the fear wasn't exactly important. Herc Hanson is not Stacker Pentecost. What he is, is a man intent on preventing others from cocking up the job.

 

“Everything looks great. Our poster children are ready to roll.”

 

“Call Mori and Becket ‘our children’ again and I’ll crack ya, Choi.”

 

“Yes, sir, Marshall.”

 

Herc opens up a comm to the pilots, thumbing down the switch. “Mori. Don’t think you’re off the hook for yur stunt with the journalist. Just cuz I told ya not to let Becket embarrass the Pan Pacific Defense Corps does not mean that I gave _you_ license to do it for him. Am I understood?”

 

“Understood, Marshall.”

 

“Good.” A beat. “He was a fuckin’ wanker though, so I won’t piss on about it for too long. Just do your job, Ranger.”

 

There is a smile in her tone. “Yes, Marshall.”

 

“Prepare for neural handshake.”

 

“Cycling up neural handshake. In three… two… one…” Mori and Becket spike together. Readings from the motion harness tell him they simultaneously went tense, eyes slammed shut, arched back into their motion harnesses before the drift caught them up and they relaxed together. Their hear-rates sync almost immediately. “Pilot-to-pilot alignment at twenty percent and climbing,” says Tendo. Becket twitches a little in his harness, then Mako. “Machine-to-pilot corruption at point zero five percent. Neural load cleared at 80% and climbing. Bridge is at ninety percent and holding strong.”

 

Herc is watching his Rangers’ stats himself, arms folded. The holo-scans catch neon in his eyes, intent on the sync-data indicative of the successful neural-bridge.

 

“Still a bit out of alignment.”

 

“Prolly from Becket’s end.”

 

“From soloing Gipsy Danger in the Breach?”

 

“Yeah.” Tendo rolls his chair over, points at region of Raleigh’s brainscan that is lightly orange on the display. “See here? This is where the neural-load mainlined Gispy’s whole operating system into his head. Synaptic corruption. Brain’s elastic so that’ll go mostly, but last time Backet got five years between a solo neural-load and getting back in a Jaeger. This time, we have him back in the jockey seat in less than five months.”

 

“We aren’t at war, Mr. Choi.” Herc glances at him. His face is unreadable, his tone is not. “So I agree. Let’s not rush them.”

 

“Got it. Reducing pilot-to-machine connections. Motor-control only, killing dermal sensors and machine-pilot drivesuit lines. Keep it simple.” He opened the comm again. “How’s the drift, Rangers?”

 

“All good,” says Becket at the same time Mori chimes, “Easy.”

 

“Alright,” says Tendo, grinning over his control board. “Well then, show me some neural-load data. Strike a pose Tokyo Reaction.” 

 

And out beyond the viewing panels of LOCCENT Control, standing at ready in the Shatterdome hanger, the beautiful mirror-shine dome of the Jaeger’s Conn-Pod rotates on its cervical-mount until it’s looking at LOCCENT. Tokyo Reaction looks like a three billion bucks. The Conn-Pod’s whole face is almost entirely one-way military-grade hard-shell polymer – dark orange plates, glass-smooth set in the dark steel cage of skull of the Pod itself, which terminates backward into hard fin-like sensor-arrays. Gives Tokyo the look of some giant hawkish motorcyclist. Compiled with Tokyo’s incredibly long torso, and thin blade-edged arms… its almost gawky looking. Skinny for a Jaeger.

 

Tokyo’s right arm lifts, stretches out, palm spread. The hand rotates in the wrist rotor, finely jointed fingers curling into a fist and the whole Control room bursts into a series of cheers and clapping. Tokyo Reaction is moving. Tendo glances at the Marshall who surveys without comment while team Mori-Becket maneuver their shiny new Jaeger into defensive boxer’s stance in the hanger and another cheer goes up from around the Shatterdome.

 

“Bios are still green,” says Tendo.

 

“All system diagnostics are coming back clean.”

 

“Pilot alignment is holding at optimal levels. Machine-to-pilot connection holding.”

 

In the hanger, Tokyo Reaction throws a few lazy punches, the velocity of his fists sending shockwaves of air through the whole launch bay and people cheer again. Tendo is grinning. Hanson is rolling his eyes. He’ll probably reprimand them for showboating but is clearly holding off because the din of excited Shatterdome techs is deafening and, frankly, this is what everyone has been waiting for. It’s a good moment. Then – in the seconds between Tendo grinning and turning to look at Herc – everything goes wrong.

 

A klaxon sounds off and the whole room goes red. In the hangar, Tokyo Reaction jars violently and, through the comm, Mako screams. Their bio-metrics across the board instantly spike hard into the red-zone. Tendo thinks ‘ _fuckingshittingChrist_ ’ and immediately activates the motor-control failsafes. By then, Raleigh is screaming too.

 

“Warning!” says LOCCENT, the control AI calm and mechanical. “Machine-to-pilot corruption at 30%. Pilot alignment at 60%. Disengaging motor-relays. Auto-shutdown in fifteen seconds. Pilot alignment at 55%. Please correct pilot-to-pilot connection.”

 

Tokyo Reaction spasms violently, right shoulder jerking backward, his spinal strut arching, head thrown back in a way that other Jaegers never did. Then the whole Jaeger – like a building coming down, in slow motion – falls forward out of the staging area onto one knee, sparks hurling up from where the steel hits the concrete and screams filter up from the hanger. A hand the size of a small apartment comes down on the floor, fingers splintering the stone as they curl and dig.

 

“PULL THEM OUT!” Herc Hanson is yelling. “PULL THEM OUT NOW!”

 

“I am!”

 

“Right hemisphere at 40% machine corruption,” says LOCCENT pleasantly. “Critical neural-bridge failure. Disengage right hemisphere. Warning: Neurological damage imminent. Disengage machine-to-pilot connectivity.” Raleigh is not screaming anymore. He’s unconscious. Alone in the drift with straggering holocaust of Tokyo Reaction's full neural-load, Mako Mori’s brain ignites like a lightbulb going supernova and she screams her partner’s name, she screams until her voice splinters and failsafes finally kick in. They cut the machine-to-pilot connection and Tokyo Reaction goes dark. Tendo is already out of his seat.

 

“Medical to launch bay one! NOW!” Herc Hanson is out the door. "Tendo, you FIND OUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED!"

 

“What just happened...” Tendo repeats. He is staring out the bay windows into the hanger, where technicians are already maneuvering a crane into place to access the Conn-Pod. Tokyo Reaction is still, kneeling quietly, head down like it’s resting. His hand hurts. He's been gripping his rosary so tightly it's pushing the beads up into his palm, like knobs of bone. “How did that just happen? That can’t – …”

 

“Raleigh?” Mako’s voice over the comm sounds far away, doesn’t sound like her at all, sounds like she’s seven years old. “Raleigh… Rals, please… please…”

 

“Machine-to-pilot connection terminated,” says LOCCENT, “Running full system scan. Would you like to try again?” 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. 0 Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mako comes face to face with Raleigh being the only family she has left and how far she might go in the defense of that. Raleigh wakes up. The world is less kind than it was this morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings for this chapter, except maybe that I screwed up on some Japanese. So warning for non-Japanese speaker with a copy and paste function.

 

***

Mori has crazy eyes.

 

Herc thinks, maybe, this has to stop. She has Raleigh Becket’s blood on her face, vomit in her hair, her drive suit still on, and she looks like she’s going to come out of her seat and punch some poor bastard in the balls for looking at her cross-ways. While Herc sympathizes with the impulse, Mori won’t do anyone any good if she has a psychotic break in the med-bay waiting room and dislocates someone’s jaw – which is something Herc suspects she is capable of.

 

“Mori.”

 

Her eyes dart to him, then back to the doors directly across from her, where the red light over the med-bay entryway is still on. Her hand on her knee is rigor mortis locked, her fingers digging into the polycarbonate armor, the bones pushing white through the thin skin at the finger joints. She stares, fixated on that light, the reflection catching in the over-bright surface of her eyes. The blood has backed out of her face entirely, making the single red smear on her jawline stand out like a line of Crayola.

 

Bulldogs, however, have no sense of crazy eyes and Max waddles over and sits by her feet.

 

Herc follows his dog’s lead and moves to crouch next to her. She doesn’t acknowledge him.

 

“Mori,” he says gently, “look at me.” She manages to look at him for a moment longer before looking back to the door. She bites her lips, pursing them so tightly the skin flushes white. She blinks rapidly. “Mako.” She finally turns her head. “You need to get out of your drive suit. You also need to take a shower, get something to eat.”

 

“No,” she says. Then, “Marshal, I don’t think I should leave.”

 

“Becket is fine. The neural-load knocked him unconscious, triggered some sensory relapse. He’s just in there for scans and bed-rest until he levels out a little. Then they’ll wake him up, but he’ll be out for a while. They told you that twenty minutes ago.”

 

“The load-parameters were too high.” She’s whispering. Her eyes go back to that light over the door. “Why were they so high?”

 

“Tendo is lookin' into that an'  _you_ can look into it after you get a shower an' stop looking psychotic.” When she doesn’t answer he taps her on the knee. Max woofs. “Ranger, you hearin' me?”

 

She looks at him finally, really, and her mouth opens and words form but no sound comes. Slowly, the corners of her lips turn down, pull back, and a tremble crosses her lips… but before it gets farther than that, she wipes her mouth like there’s something there, scrubs her palm across her cheek. The tremble is gone, the feverish anguish in her eyes cooled back to base-line calm and when she stands up there is nothing left of the glass-eyed agony or whatever had been on the tip of her tongue. She’s swallowed that.

 

“Yes, Marshal,” she says. A soldier to her commander.

 

“The docs say your scans came back clean. No neural damage.”

 

“Raleigh’s won’t come back clean.”

 

Herc eyes her for a moment, studying the complex stillness of her face. She is twenty-one years old. “No,” he says finally, folding his arms, looking down at her. “His scans haven't been clean for a long time though, and he doesn’t need to be 100% to pilot. He just needs to be within the operational bell-curve and he has you. He’ll be fine." He maintains his mein of a man giving a debreif. "When that Jaeger malfunctioned, you two were hooked in for less than thirty seconds. Nowhere near enough time to do any significant damage. You’ll both pilot again and just fine. No harm done.”

 

“It’s different.” Max tilts his head at her. “Actually feeling it,” she continues. “I’ve only felt it in the Drift.”

 

“The full neural load?”

 

“It _burned._ ” She looks down at the palm of her left hand, stares into the creases. “He burned in Anchorage.” She closes her hand. “I _saw,_ but I didn’t understand.”

 

Herc glances around, but there’s no one in medical but the wait staff and Max.

 

“Look,” he says, placing hands on her shoulders and standing in front of her, head down to speak to her. “No matter how closely synced ya are, no second-hand memory will ever be like th' actual thing. That's th' illusion of th' Drift – the certainty that we know our partners so well there's nothin' left to say an' it’s _not true._ ” Herc watches her face a moment, keeps his own tone schooled, though his poker face has nothing on hers. “We’re closer than any humans have ever been… an' we can still misunderstand everything.”

 

She closes her eyes. “There’s too much,” she says.

 

Herc doesn’t know how to respond to that other than, “I know.” Then, when she only sits there, he adds, “Go get cleaned up. He’ll want you when he wakes.”

 

She nods, once, calmly, then stands up and walks away. Watching Mako Mori walk has been difficult for Herc and now is probably the worst it’s been, because when Mako Mori sets off at a pace intent on her destination – shoulders back, stride long, head slightly down, directed and slightly dangerous – she walks exactly like Chuck Hanson. She gets about four meters before Max goes galumphing after her, snuffling happily at her heels until Herc calls him back. Confused, Max looks down the hall toward Mako, but comes trudging back to nose his face into Herc’s palm. Marshal Hanson finally exhales.

 

“Leave her be, Max.” Max licks his hand, woofs. “Let her go.”

 

\---

 

 

 _“ –an’t believe you’re telling me what I should –” “Are you serious?”_ _「_ _目を覚まして_ _._ _」_ _“There’s something under my bed, big brother. Can you please –?”_ _「先生は、花よりも美しいです_ _!_ _」_ _“Don’t go. Please. Please don’t go.” “Apple pie is not the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, but it’s up there and I have put some seriously heinous shit in my –”_ _「_ _先生_ _._ _愛し_ _ています_ _._ _」_ _“– are hogging all the blankets, Yance. Stop kicking –” “– I can’t feel my fucking arm!”_ _「どのおもちゃ_ _で遊ぶ？」_ _”The more I try to forget about him, the more I remember him.”_ _「彼のこと、忘れようとすればするほど、思い出しちゃう_ _…_ _」_ _”Mako Mori, Monster Killer, Daughter of Tokyo. Godzilla’s got nothin’ on you.” “Why are there Skittles in your pant-pockets, Raleigh?” “There’s something wrong.”_

The water is ice-cold.

 

Mako doesn’t bother trying to warm it up, she just gasps as the water hits her skin, rinsing freezing fingers down her scalp and bare shoulders. She turns her face up into the cone of cold water, shivering violently, and waking up completely. She is stunned by the feeling of being naked, of the water running down her bare skin, sliding down her face, her back and legs. She is stunned by the co-opting of her every sensory pathway to the sensation of knifing cold, her muscles cramping up, shivers seizing her.

 

Her fingers press against the metal of the shower stall, palm knitted to the wall, her other hand flat against her belly as she tries to breathe through the growing knot in her guts, swelling through her, pressing at her insides. She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to think. The neural parameters for the PONS and the neural-bridge were outside her area of expertise. Tokyo Reaction had been designed by the Japanese Jaeger division who outfitted him with an operating system not dissimilar from Tacit Ronin and, since Gipsy Danger’s own systems had used a similar system, there was nothing to suggest that –

 

A door slams somewhere in the halls outside.

 

Mako breathes and Raleigh jolts through her – _what is happening, Jesus Christ, Mako, listen to me –!_ Then they are screaming – a single organism in agony, snared burning in the Drift. His thoughts dissolve in her thoughts like iodine, fragment into raw emotional current slamming through her so hard she cannot comprehend, then snap like a bone in her brain a split second before the full neural load burns through every corner of her mind and tries to stop her heart beating.

 

Mako breathes and can’t get away from her partner.

 

She is possessed by him, the electromagnetics of his body inhabiting her skin and she clenches her whole body until it hurts and when that isn’t enough she runs a hand down her thigh, digs her nails into the skin and eventually runs her fingers between her legs her fingers over her clit just to remind herself which body she is in, woman, Japanese, twenty-one, Mako Mori and not Raleigh Becket, male, American, twenty-six, unconscious in medical because some glitch in the bridge fired up every light in his head.

 

“Raleigh.” She says his name to comfort herself. It doesn’t comfort her. “Raleigh… no…no…”

 

Her palm slams into the wall before she can think better of it and before she can stop herself she is slamming her fist against the wall over and over until the thin metal sheeting bends and her bones hum hot with pain. She is gripping her hair by the roots and fighting down a shriek and then she is not fighting it anymore, she is screaming and the sound is barely human. She drops to a crouch on the shower floor, buries her face in her knees and hyper-ventilates through the water running down her face and mouth. The pressure in her lungs threatens to collapse them like ruptured balloons. The panic is gasoline in her veins and she is sitting astride a metal coffin in the Pacific all over again, begging the world to not to end in her arms.

 

 _“Ready to step into my head, kid?”_ says Raleigh, no, not Raleigh. She is Raleigh. Yancy is smiling at her and no, _no_ , she is Mako Mori and her partner has just been ripped out of alignment, pain like a rebar through his skull, knifing him to the wall of his memories and she screams before he does because it’s not a R.A.B.I.T it’s just _pain._ Her body is lit up along the circuit-suit relays, from the soles of her feet to the roof of her mouth and she is aware of her heart beating and her lungs breathing and her nuclear-powered heart spinning in the steel cage of her chest. Raleigh has gone out like a light in her brain. He’s hanging in his harness like a corpse and….

 

She is on the floor of her shower, curled up in a ball trying to breathe.

 

_“If I'm going to get through this, I'm going to need you to protect me.”_

 

Her eyes are hot despite the freezing water, the living organ of her heart taking root in her chest, growing thin liquid veins, poisonous and burning, through the body of her flesh. The possibility of his death makes her _become_ and she is afraid of the silicone blood burning through her veins, of the fangs and the claws recessed beneath her skin – what lies on the other side of her partner’s death is a place where nothing can stop her.

 

Her nails dig grooves into the skin of her scalp.

 

 _“She’s my co-pilot.”_ She inhales. _“Is it also, by definition, disgusting.”_ She exhales. _“Gotta let it go.”_

 

She breathes.

 

\---

 

Raleigh wakes up with a hole in his head.

 

There is no other wake to describe how it is when he comes back to consciousness and feels the parts of his brain that was cleaved in half in Anchorage, where the PONs gripped his brother by the roots and ripped him out of his skull and for a split second it’s Anchorage again. His wrists are strapped to the bedside and there’s a hole in his head and the hole is full of blood and electricity. His eyes are full of blood and snow and there is an animal chewing its way out of his chest and that animal is his heart.

 

“Yancy,” he says, panicking. “ _Yance_ …”

 

A pair of hands fit under his jaw, pull his face to the left and before he fully knows what’s happening his co-pilot has their mouth against his and the hole in his head fills up and he –

 

 _“-use a screwdriver,” says Yancy, palming the switchblade and putting it in his back pocket. “If they try to grab you, Rals, you take an eye –” and she is moving, faster than these men clearly expected, or could have ever expected, a fifteen-year-old girl to move which is at the exact speed it takes to put a bo staff in their gut –“Someone get this idiot off me,” he’s saying, Yancy grinning down at him on the Kwoon room mat and he says – “Fuck ‘em up, Mori.” She doesn’t know him or the accent, but he’s the only one her age. There’s a Ranger patch on his jacket and she– “–can tell he’s a fuckin’ piece of work. Just keep clear_ – _?”_

– he forgets who is on top of him, who is kissing him, which co-pilot’s fingers are sliding through his hair, because he’s got at least one memory of each on top of him and he raggedly inhales against their teeth and he doesn’t kiss them back because Yancy isn’t –

 

“Raleigh.” Mako is hovering over him, a halogen halo of light around her head. _「_ _I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?_ _」_

 

“No,” he says.  

 

She leans her brow against his and he breathes her in. Her mind – even through the million-mile barrier of skin and bone between them – cauterizes the wound on contact, a blade burning a molecular path through his head and sears shut the ragged part of his head. She seals over hole where the memory of Yancy Becket, laughing, post-Drift drunk, pulling him too close and kissing him in a fit of adrenaline and Drift – Mako Mori doesn’t taste the same. She is steel and fear and she tastes clean, not like sweat and relay gel, though she burns the same malarial heat against his body.

 

Mako’s skin against his feels too hot, like her bones are radioactive. His mouth feels bruised, or burned, like her lips seared the keloid shadow of her heat like a tattoo on his body, laying lines on him where his circuit suit never branded the skin. Raleigh can’t keep track of which scars are Yancy’s and which are Mako’s. The blurring between the two makes Raleigh’s insides twist up and turn over but the the panic her feels when her hand moves away, leaving an impression of heat and sunlight, is too great to stop him saying, _「_ _Don’t go_. _」_

 

His hands are not bound after all.

 

He catches her hands, palm to palm with his and without any discussion she gets up and climbs onto the bed and with zero preamble lies on top of him, her head on his shoulder, her hands pressing his into the pillows by his head and the weight of her on top of him is almost enough to quiet the memory of his head going nuclear, his brain shorting out and tearing the Drift apart around him. The thrum of her heart against his sternum makes him wish he could open up somehow, let her climb inside him and curl up in the cavern of his chest. The desire he feels for his co-pilot isn’t the same as wanting her, it’s like wanting to _be_ her.

 

He knows he’s Drift-sick. So is she. 

 

“I miss you,” says Mako. “You’re right here, but I miss you…”

 

“That’ll go away after a while,” he promises.

 

“I felt you stop. In my mind you just… stopped.”

 

“I know.”

 

“It was almost like…” She doesn’t say his brother’s name, she holds it on her tongue. “It scared me.”

 

“Mako,” he says, finally, sometime later. “What happened?”

 

“Someone sabotaged Tokyo’s neural load inhibitors.”  

 

He sits up a little. “What?’

 

Mako’s calm, though she maintains it beautifully, is a lie. She is as she always is: a razor girl. And she looks at him with this expression that says nothing, but through the language of the ghost Drift between them, he knows she has begun some terrible calculations. “Someone changed the neural load parameters, placed them far outside our safety thresholds. Then they disabled the auto-checks. The Marshal is opening an investigation but there is no one capable of this kind of sabotage outside of the PPDC.”

 

“Someone… on our crew did this to us?”

 

“Yes. Marshal Hansen thinks it may have been one of the engineers being reassigned or one of the short-term contractors.”

 

Raleigh runs a hand down his face, mumbling. “I knew the budget for Tokyo wasn’t gonna cover anything like the full military.” He shook his head. “But Jesus… _sabotage_? For a pay out? If Tendo had powered us up at 100% load that could have done some actual damage.”

 

“I am aware,” says Mako. The way she says it… is dangerous.

 

He sits up. Mako is still straddling his stomach so when he fully sits up, his face is very close hers. “Don’t,” he says.

 

“Do not order me how to feel, Raleigh Becket.”

 

“I’m not tellin’ you how to feel, I’m tellin’ you not to do something crazy _because_ of how you feel.”

 

Her fingers catch his chin between her thumb and forefinger, holding him still so when she leans closer, expression perfectly arctic, he can’t inch back. “They hurt my _family_.”

 

“They tried.”

 

“Ranger Becket… ” She only calls him ‘Ranger Becket’ when she’s angry. Like how she swaps to formal Japanese when she’s annoyed with him. The intensity of her anger now is nothing like he’s seen in his time with her – it throbs in the air between them like the pulse of some impossible exothermic animal and he becomes aware, as he always is, that his partner is not quick on the draw, but when she does draw… it’s for blood. She’s looking at him and he can see the numbers there, the arithmetic of her rage. “If I do something because of how I _feel_ , it will not be crazy.”

 

“That’s what I’m scared of, moron.”

 

She makes a kind of hissing sound and lets go of him. “You shouldn’t be so calm. Someone tried to kill us.”

 

“Who says I’m calm? I want to crack someone’s skull open. I just have a notion that Herc will get there first and there won’t be anything left for either of us.”

 

“We’ve got our core crew helping re-set Tokyo Reaction’s systems. Tendo says it should take just a few hours, but they are going to run more diagnostics and install analog failsafes this time. Herc says he will work on revamping the security checks and maintenance logs. Protocols were lax after Operations Pitfall and we didn’t expect –”

 

Raleigh fits is hands to Mako’s waist and tips his head against her collarbone, which interrupts her. She sighs, not an exasperated sound, just a release of pressure and he feels some of the tension slide out of her spine before she wraps her arms around his head and runs her fingers up from the base of his skull. He doesn’t quite groan when his partner grips a fistful of his hair. She’s holding him a bit too tight, but he doesn’t really mind. Her fingers in his hair tighten to the point his scalp aches a little, her short nails scraping skin a little and he feels her single ragged breath.

 

“We’re fine,” he tells her, because she likes to hear him say so aloud.

 

She presses her mouth against the top of his head, inhales.

 

“Okay.” 

 

 

 

 


	5. 1200 Hours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mako draws fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No content warning for this chapter. Feedback and comments are much appreciated and usually taken to heart while I work on the next chapter. Please message me if you want to talk about Pacific Rim because I love talking about Pacific Rim.

***

Mako is frowning at her juice box.

 

It’s not the juice box’s fault it’s just that its grape and grape tastes like Sydney Australia, summer of 2022. So hot the air hurts, AC broken, PT in the morning, Chuck Hansen half naked in a blow-up kiddy pool in the middle of the Shatterdome hanger bay because – of course, exactly – he would do that. Grape tastes like camo swim trunks and the look he gives her over the top of his shades and grape is the way he just slides them back on and says, “ _Fuuuuuuuuuuck,”_ dragging the word between his teeth like wire around her throat until: “ _The old man’s in Bay 4. Piss off, Mori.”_

 

Grape tastes like the Popsicle he gave her when they were twelve. _“I stole it,”_ he said as she put it in her mouth. It tasted better after he said that.

 

“Mako. They’re ready for us.”

 

She surprises Raleigh by catching the lapel of his jacket and tugging him down so she can whisper directly into his ear, “I don’t want to speak with them.”

 

“Right,” he says, turning his head so he’s speaking almost directly against her mouth, “because this is totally my idea and I’m all about talking to paper-pushers about my fuck ups.”

 

“Then we’re agreed,” she says, still nose-to-nose with him. “We run.”

 

He tips his forehead against hers so he’s looking down at her. “We’re not leaving Herc to the bureaucracy. Kaiju, maybe, but not the bureaucracy.” The blue of his eyes is very judgmental. “C’mon, Miss Mori, we need to explain how crazy people are sabotaging our giant robot because fucking monster-god-bullshit. It’s going to be fun.”

 

“We don’t know for sure it’s any of the pro-Kaiju groups.”

 

“Who else could it be?”

 

“Any number of the anti-Jaeger movements,” she says, “Hong Kong for Demilitarization, Kill All Robots, The Naturalists – there are half a dozen grass-roots anti-war demonstrations going on right now protesting that a single Jaeger exist in the world, controlled ostensibly by the super powers–”

 

“Okay, okay,” says Raleigh, “but it _could_ be crazy cultists in funny hats.”

 

Mako cannot reconcile his ability to be cavalier with what she knows. “This is serious, you know.”

 

“I know. I also know they did zero damage to any of Tokyo’s systems and we’re both cleared to jockey. So whoever it is…” He straightens up and flicks her in the forehead, ignores her ‘ow!’ of protest. “They got nothin’. C’mon.”

 

Mako throws her juice box away as they leave the mess hall. She means to throw it with force into the bottom of the bin but what she ends up doing is holding onto it a second – _stole it_ – before releasing it gently from her fingertips into the trashcan. Raleigh catches her putting her thumb between her lips to catch a drop with her tongue and kind of brow-arches at her in that way that he does. That way that she cannot replicate because her brows don’t function like his and she does not possess his ability to shed abuse and make stupid faces less than 24 hours after an attempted murder.

 

“Don’t punch anyone this time,” says Raleigh through the corner of his mouth.

 

She thinks about punching him.

 

The tele-conference room is populated by Herc, Tendo, and Newton Geilzer who looks like he doesn’t know why he’s there and who to blame for interrupting his work on that really massive manifesto he’s been doing for months straight. Mako has asked before what it’s about and from what she understands it’s ‘ _everything that I can remember from Drifting with several chunks of Kaiju brain and nearly killing myself, Mako. It’s gonna be great.’_ He’s a rockstar though, so if he has bedhead and 5 o’clock shadow, he’s earned it.

 

“Hey guys.” Herc and Tendo are booting up the tele-conference software. “What’s up?”

 

“Kaiju groupies,” says Raleigh. “I hear from reliable sources that you know something about ‘em.”

 

“Har har. Hermann is a fucker. I have zero insight into balls to the wall bonkers, man. Or at least, the new off-shoot groups or whatever. The original Church of the Kaiju I know something about only because they have really aggressive pamphleteers. Like… _really_ aggressive. One time, in New York, I was on my to this conference right, and there was the, like, _pack_ of ‘em in the subway and _–”_

Mako clears her throat because Herc Hansen is looking at them in a matter that Stacker Pentecost might have once looked at all of them, except with a very real threat of being knocked upside the head. Newt shuts up. Raleigh smiles far too largely. Mako elbows him. Herc’s expression says ‘ _I will beat each of you bloody so help me’_ and he signals them to come stand behind and next to him at the front of the room. The file over and he turns back to the series of large screens.

 

A handful of the screens blip on.

 

“Good morning, Marshall.” The first representative to speak is Yuki Kawori, the new head of the Japanese division of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. She personally over-saw the administration and vetting of Project Dawnbreaker and her influence with the Japanese is what puts public and government money into Tokyo Reaction’s restoration. Her expression is cool, her hair bound up. Mako knows her just well enough to know Mrs. Kawori is not pleased, but she’s not precisely angry. She seems anxious and not pleased to be so. “We have much to discuss.”

 

“We have a preliminary report here,” says Joseph Bell, the rep from Great Britain, jumping right into it. “Sabotage? You’re sure of this, Marshal?”

 

“The report was clear.” The rep from Chile. She folds her hands on the desk. Her eyelids are gold. “Are you here to ask for additional funding for security personnel, Marshal?”

 

“No, our hosts in Hong Kong have already seen to supplementary security personnel and cooperation from the local authorities.” He nods to Prime Minister Zhu on screen three. “But our investigation has led us to believe the saboteur was one of our own.” Herc opens a folder and sets a piece of paper face down on camera pad, the document popping up on a screen-share function for the representatives. “This is a series of emails that were pulled under warrant to one of our veteran engineers, a Mister Harvey Lowell. He’s fled the country and he was the last logged into Tokyo Reaction’s Pons-integration systems. He used a co-workers key-card. We have them in custody now, but it’s believed he stole the card from her home while she was on leave.”

 

“And you believe Mr. Lowell was paid to sabotage the project?”

 

“With respect, he was paid try to kill our pilots.”

 

The silence that follows weighs a tangible amount. Every rep glances at Mako and Raleigh, standing at Herc’s left.

 

“Mister Choi and Miss Mori recently implemented new neural-check failsafes and series of bridge-integration fallbacks to reduce risk of machine-to-pilot contamination. These checks are designed precisely to catch and protect pilots from feedback and neurological damage. Mr. Lowell deactivated all the previous failsafes, but failed to take into account the implementation of the new ones. Had the new fail safes not been in place the full neural load could have killed or seriously injured one or both of my Rangers so –” Herc’s tone has reached Pentecost-levels of ‘do not fucking fuck with me’. “–I am taking this very seriously.”

 

Raleigh glances at Mako. His expressions says _‘is that true?’_ because weapon systems and plasma-caster trajectory and how much force it takes to split a Cat-2’s skull, and how to shake a R.A.B.I.T are things he knows, but the new tech and PONS limiters are not usually his concern. Mako inclines her head slightly _‘yes’,_ though she cannot explain that the load would have, specifically, killed _him_. The mind could only become a monster so many time before, like a light, it burned out.  

 

“Chinese authorities in Hong Kong in addition to PPDC military police are looking for Mr. Lowell and trying to determine who paid him and why.”

 

“Uhh,” says Newt.

 

Everyone peers at him.

 

“Sorry, uh, just a thing here… you might…” Newt’s got a netbook out on his lap, sitting cross-legged on desk behind Mako who rolls her eyes ceilingward in the beseeching kind of way she does when Newt is doing something weird. “Okay, so this, like, literally just hit the Blue Blood Network so you’re probably gonna get a call from Hong Kong police in like two seconds but… oh, just look.”

 

He hops off the desk, hands the netbook to Tendo who peers at it, looks at Newt, then plugs it into the computer he already has set up, looping in the share-screen function again. On screen a webpage spawns with a live video-feed from www.allbleedblue.org – a black backdrop with a fake Emergency Kaiju Alert screen in a video frame. The audio comes through:

 

_“ –not the end of our efforts. The Pan Pacific Defense Corp and their soldiers will receive God’s wrath. The door to the new world will again open when the blood of the profaners baptizes the sea. The Whore and the Heretic will both see the face of God and burn for their transgressions. Already their dead christen the waters. Ranger Charles Hansen and Marshal Stacker Pentecost have already burned before the altar of our salvation – the Child Soldier and the False Prophet. Cursed are the profaners –”_

Herc Hansen leans forward, bracing his hands against the table in front of him.

 

“They’re taking responsibility for the attack?”

 

“Yeah, they’re saying it’s just the beginning. Blah, blah, fire and brimstone, blah.”

 

“This video is playing across the world in different languages,” says Tendo, already on his laptop.

 

“Media’s getting a hold of it,” says Newt, Googling furiously. “It’s already in the blogosphere, man. The Church of the Kaiju and the Sisters are posting response videos – fuck. Raleigh.” He looks up from his computer. “Sorry man, they have footage of you.”

 

He blinks. “What?”

 

“From the hangar, of them pulling you out of the Conn-Pod. Someone sold the footage to CNN. You too Mako. It’s all hitting the net at once. I don’t… I mean, they could be lying but I think the Blue Bloods just bumped from the terrorist watch list to the actual goddamn list.”

 

“We need to release a statement,” says Miss Kawori, unfazed in tone if not in expression. She seems unnerved. “And show nothing of Project Dawnbreaker has been held up by their efforts. Ranger Becket, Ranger Mori – would be you comfortable appearing for a press conference? No questions need be answered by you, but I would like to show that you’re both well. People are going to be scared. The footage is… disturbing.”

 

Raleigh lifts his chin slightly. The footage, they both know without looking, is of the medical team pulling Raleigh out of the back of the Jaeger Conn-Pod like a cadaver, bleeding from the nose as Shatterdome personnel haul him into the loading flat of a cargo crane and use power drills to unscrew his armor from his body. Somewhere in the foreground or the background or off screen –Mako. Her fighting the technicians tooth and nail who try to hold her back as her partner, for a moment, stops breathing. There’s probably no audio, but if there is, she’ll be screaming in it.

 

“We’re fine with that,” says Raleigh. “Marshal?”

 

Herc’s face is nearly unrecognizable.

 

“Yeah, we’ll release a statement,” he says. The glow from the TVs seems to impossibly deepen the lines in his face. “And it’ll be true: they haven’t slowed down a damn thing.” The broadcast is repeating. They are talking about the Wei Triplets now and Herc, it seems, has stomached all he can stand just then. “Turn. That. Off.” Newt and Tendo both turn off the audio. Herc looks at the faces on the screens. “Let us know where and when and I’ll coordinate it.”

 

“Thank you, Marshal.”

 

If anyone has anything else to say, they don’t, because the Blue Bloods just called Chuck ‘the child solider’ and there will be no further words with Hercules Hansen. The reps disconnect from the Shatterdome feed and for a good long moment it’s silent in that room. Raleigh isn’t smiling anymore. Newt and Tendo are looking at the floor. And Mako – she is watching Herc Hansen because she is fluent in the kinetic shorthand of the Hansen family. She reads the threat in the angle of his head, in the line of his shoulders. She knows his body language because, years ago, Marshal Stacker Pentecost got in a Jaeger named Lucky Seven and wrote the dialect into his partner’s DNA.

 

“You want us back in that Jaeger?” Raleigh says what she is thinking.

 

“No, Becket, Mori.” Herc looks at him though the corner of his eyes. “I’m _ordering_ you to get back in the Jaeger.”

 

Raleigh’s mouth pulls at the corner. “Yes, sir,” he says.

 

Mako feels something wet in her fists and when she looks, there’s blood beneath her nails.

 

***

 

 

Raleigh is breathing into an old sweatshirt.

 

It isn’t anyone’s fault he’s doing this. It just that five years nine months ago Yancy Becket died off the shores of Anchorage and Raleigh made the decision – on his knees, tasting copper, elbows deep in Yancy’s footlocker – to wear his brother’s clothes. 

 

Barefoot in their cabin, he’d stripped to his boxers and pulled on Yancy’s best work shirt and jeans, faded soft and too wide at the waist. He strapped them to his hips with Yancy’s clinch-buckle belt, then dug out Yancy’s blue sweatshirt, the one with the holes in the elbow. He found Yancy’s old bomber jacket in the back of his locker. He dressed in his brother’s clothes, then laid in his brother’s bed and fell asleep for the first time in two days because, when the was ten, he used to fabricate monsters to get his brother to sleep in his room with him.

 

He’s never been scared of anything, but one thing.

 

Now, Raleigh is sitting on a bench in the hallway, elbows braced against his knees, waiting for Mako. He’s got on his own jacket but underneath it is Yancy’s blue sweat shirt, the one he’d managed not to destroy like he did all the rest of Yancy’s clothes. He’s got the sleeve pulled over his wrist and his wrist against his nose and mouth, breathing slowly and he _knows_ his clothes have stopped smelling like Yancy but it doesn’t matter because his brain has etched his brother’s scent into his bones and he can’t forget – the exact mix of aftershave, skin, and antiperspirant that evokes Yancy’s smile.

 

Mako catches him throwing up in the lavatory.

 

It’s the men’s lavatory.

 

That doesn’t seem to concern Mako, though, it concerns the technician at the third urinal down. Mako is unfazed; her boots are on the other side of his stall door and Raleigh can sense her placing a hand against the door, listening intently. He thinks, as he retches again into the silver bowl of the toilet, that maybe eating the whole bag of Skittles she bought him in one go was A: a terrible idea and B: he would do it again in heartbeat.

 

But he’s not just throwing up rainbows because of his poor impulse control.

 

And Mako knows it.

 

“Raleigh.”

 

“Out in a minute.” He sounds like he feels. “Must be the sedatives they used.”

 

 _Lying._ He feels her thinking it through the door. Or rather, he can precisely picture the small furrow of her brow and the tensing of her mouth and the exact arrangement of that face she makes when she knows he’s lying. This is inch for inch the expression she is wearing when he opens the door finally and she’s standing too close to him. That he’s been throwing up with his head in a toilet is of no consequence to her.

 

“Raleigh,” she says again, letting him take her shoulders and move her slightly. “We can postpone.”

 

“Nope.”

 

“We are not at war,” she says, like he needs reminding. Like that isn’t _his_ line to her when she burns through the night like the war clock is still running and she isn’t carrying her own ghosts with her. The ghosts that possess her do not bring her to her knees like they bring Raleigh Becket. Her grief is manic and unseen, bloodied knuckles in after dark and screaming into mattresses. She says ‘ _we are not at war’_ but she doesn’t mean it. “Raleigh?”

 

He rinses his mouth out in the sink. His teeth are still sugar-grainy so he does it a second time and his tongue feels raw against the roof of his mouth. He shakes his head, spits water down the sink and he’s not sure if it’s red because of the dye or because his mouth is bleeding. He is apathetic about which because – _your brother is in hell_ – it just doesn’t seem important.

 

“We shouldn’t rush.”

 

“Any slower and we’ll be going backwards.”

 

“Raleigh.”

 

“Don’t,” he says, “try to tell _me_ that you want to postpone.”

 

Mako says nothing.

 

 

She reaches for his hand and, for the first time in five months, he moves away from her. It’s not even a flinch. Raleigh consciously moves beyond the proximity of her body heat, leaving her fingers curling slightly in air where his thumb had been and she looks up at him. It is difficult to explain the way in which her eyes can break open his heart at the base, send its contents falling into the cavern of his chest. He lets her take his hand and she puts something in his palm, curling his fingers around it.

 

“For luck,” she says.

 

Then she stands up on her toes and kisses him. Like all her kisses it’s once, mathematically, the trajectory plotted carefully in her mind, as dispassionate as a diagram but it’s a slow press of sunshine – if sunshine could transfuse heroine to your blood by touch alone. Raleigh shivers. And then she’s walking out of the lavatory to meet Herc and he opens his hand. He wonders how long she’s been saving this goddamn Kit-Kat bar. Its strawberry, bright cellophane wrapper printed with Japanese katakana, furiously pink and it will smell amazingly, heart-stoppingly, like home if he opens it up and breathes in.

 

It’s not his memory. The stress of grade-school exams and how his mother – _coughing, Menthol smoke, no, smiling, strawberry skin cream_ – used to pack them into his lunchbox on test day and – _がんばってね_ _!_ – wish him good luck is a lie because he is not Mako Mori, though, sometimes he forgets. He know this isn’t his comfort. It’s not even his.

 

 _I love Kit-Kat bars,_ says that part of him that’s still Yancy.

 

Raleigh puts it in his pocket.

 

***

 

 

Raleigh hands her the other half of his Kit-Kat bar under the table about five minutes into the press conference. Mako registers him tapping her knee beneath the table and then, before she even takes it from him (because she has to take it, if she refuses it, he’ll start playing footsie with her under the table) he’s got the other half of the Kit-Kat between his teeth. Later, footage of Raleigh Becket eating candy directly after an act of open terrorism against the PPDC leads people to believe that, maybe, he’s not taking the Blue Blood Network terribly seriously, or that he’s a nervous eater. The latter is true. 

 

Mako side-eyes him so hard that his head, from a purely mathematical stance, should explode.

 

“We take any breach of security very seriously.” Herc Hansen is speaking into the small sea of media lights and the flash of cameras, dark faces behind microphones and recording devices. “That said, Project Dawnbreaker is still on schedule and will not be delayed while we work out new security. This level of backlash is unexpected, but not necessarily new to us. Following the closure of the Breach in the Pacific the need for personnel on base has become secondary to the restoration and post-war rebuilds in Hong Kong. We will be re-implementing war-time security measures to ensure the safety of our crews. Effective immediately.”

 

Here is the problem with Hercules Hansen.

 

Mostly, it’s the way he moves.

 

It is difficult for Mako, sometimes. When he is speaking with her there are these moments that come and go – and they go so quickly the damage inflicted is invisible and complete. There are days when Herc Hansen says, he says to her, “ _Miss Mori, I need to see you in my office at 0600_ ,” and she must collect herself from the floor where she has _not_ fallen. He walks away and leaves her, Ranger, Miss Mori, hero, the girl who slays monsters, to gather from the ground the small pieces of her soul dislodged from their place by the way he looks at her like another man entirely.

 

She takes the Kit-Kat from Raleigh’s fingers.

 

A microphone moves forward from the crowd. “Marshal, the Blue Bloods have been moved onto official terrorist watch listed by over a dozen Pac-Pacific nations. Are there concerns for the safety of your personnel? Should all PPDC men and women be concerned?”

 

“All members of the Defense Corps should enact extra precaution,” says the Marshal. “Military police and local authorities are already mobilizing investigation into the threat and it’s highly unlikely those responsible will get a second chance at this level of sabotage again, but to answer your question: Yes. Everyone needs to take the situation seriously.”

 

“Do Rangers Becket and Mori have any comment?” asks someone else, in Chinese.

 

Herc waits for the translator. “No. They are not accepting questions at this time.”

 

“Is it true that Ranger Becket is no longer fit to pilot?” says a figure from the second row. “The footage online seems to indicate this attack was not as incidental as the Corps is making it out to be and an anonymous source from inside the PPDC says that he will be removed from the program. Any comment?”

 

“Yeah, mate, get better sources.”

 

Raleigh grins. Several cameras flash. The previous speaker is undeterred.

 

“And the claim that Mako Mori assaulted a member of the press just a few days ago? Should such a person be piloting the world’s last Jaeger?”

 

“She’s the same person who piloted Gipsy Danger in defense of Hong Kong and into the Breach,” says Herc rather coolly. The façade of amenability is flaking rapidly at the second off-point question from the peanut gallery. “So, unless the people have a problem with her performance then, I see no reason her performance now should be under review. I will accept one more question of actual relevance.”

 

“The Network has issued a threat against you personally, Marshal.” This is news. Herc frowns instead of answering immediately so the speaker, someone from the far right front row, rushes on. “The Network says their gods have judged you harshly for your sins, Marshal. This is why the gods took your wife and son.”

 

The comment is so horrible it stuns the room to complete silence.

 

So it is completely silent when Mako leans into the mic in front of her and says, “That doesn’t make sense.” It is silent when she says, in perfect, vicious English, “I _killed_ those gods.”

 

It is silent when the gun shot deafens them all. 


	6. 9:34 AM, Hong Kong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raleigh chases the RABIT. Mako forgets Chuck Hansen's smile. It's amazing how little it takes to bring down giants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains triggering content - rape, and graphic sexual violence. Feedback always very appreciated and I will answer any questions about the chapter a reader might come up with. Sorry for the delay. Real life does not accommodate time for scribbling sometimes.

 

 

***

 

The world does not end in the manner that the world should end after decades of siege and this, to Mako Mori, is the crux of everything that she is now – a persistence after the fact. Mako is woman capable of disassembling, at a glance, the machinations of a Tac-Conn 12 muscle-strand distribution algorithm, who can field strip twelve kinds of military standard and non-standard issue firearm, who saw the Technicolor burn of the Ante-verse through her partner’s eyes – for a woman like that, the end of the world has been coming since she was twelve years old.

 

Still, she doesn’t see it coming.

 

For Mako Mori the world ends at 9:34 AM, Hong Kong, when a man carrying an unregistered .40 Smith and Wesson puts a bullet in Hercules Hansen at ten meters.

 

***

 

Raleigh is falling.

 

His eyes are closed, his stomach jumped up slightly, but the fall doesn’t bother him like it used to. As the Conn-Pod hurdles down the drop-shaft, he lets the motion rig keep him buoyed up slightly, like a pair of hands along his forearms, a series of palms up his spine, and one at the back of his head. Beside him, his co-pilot is tense in the trappings of her rig, eyes forward, watching the sides of the drop-shaft spinning up past the shield-visor. Your quiet grates against her quiet – the edge of her mind on the edge of yours, touching like fingers testing something too hot.

 

The Conn-Pod slows its decent.

 

“Mako.”

 

She looks at him.

 

“You good?”

 

She nods.

 

The Pod locks into the Jaeger’s shoulders, the HUD spawning up from control board in front of them. Raleigh breathes in. The oxygen tastes a little like plastic, a little metallic too on his tongue, like licking a bullet. He straightens up in his rig, checking the interface seams where the rig slots into his armor at the elbows and wrist, aware of where it locks into the magnetic spinal relay up his back, the warm hum of the feedback cradle between his shoulder blades, the buzz of static in the aether. He does pre-Drift checks – he’s done them so many time now, its muscle memory. Mako is already done with hers, but she lets him thumb down the comm.

 

“Looks good from here, Tendo.”

 

“Cycling you both up.” His voice on the comm-link is even. On the HUD, the two-brain display cycles up in the holo-lights, access points lighting up all across the road-work of synaptic link-ups, the paths of their memories knotted impossibly tight in the cage of their skulls. Mako exhales audibly. “Prepare for neural-handshake.”

 

Raleigh steps back, sets his shoulders.

 

“Engaging neural link. In three… two… one…”

 

He closes his eyes, curls his hands into fists and _–_

 

_“– aren’t moving fast enough, little brother,” says Yancy, hooking his arm around from behind. “Gonna have to do better than –” “– that kind of thinking is what will destroy your co-pilot.” Stacker is looking down at her. His tone, if not his expressions, softens. “You cannot take this into the –” “–Drift feels like fucking, sometimes.” Raleigh covers his face. “Why the ever-loving fuck would you say–?” “– whatever the hell you want, Mori. I’m the one getting in the Conn-Pod, not you.” Chuck flicks a finger against her collarbone. “So why don’t you –?” “– let it go. You killed our monsters Mako. Don’t –“ “–get your hopes up. He’s alive, but the bullet clipped his spine. There’s not telling if he –” will ever wake up. Yancy sleeps like a dead thing so Raleigh shoves – Mako flat on the floor. Her face is wet, she tastes blood and it’s not hers it’s –_

Mako jerks in her harness, flinches, snags on the memory, lets it slide beneath her skin and Raleigh smells his own hair, Yancy’s sweatshirt against her mouth, feels his own weight on top of her as he tackles his partner to the stage floor and that gun goes off three more times. They swap. He’s on top of her again, saying, “Stay down, Mako. Mako, don’t –!” They swap. He’s underneath himself, fighting, throws an elbow into his own ribs, he feels Mako’s rage flare through her/his bones and her head come apart, her thoughts bursting napalm hot through her skull and how she screams this long animal sound. She thinks how the gunshot smells like –

_– the streets of Tokyo. The smell of relay gel in Stacker’s hair when he picks her up and – Yancy lights up on the hood of the car, the smoke drifting through the – windows blown open in her head when he says – “I’m not gonna puss out on you, Rals. I’ll –” “– be right here, brave girl.” Stacker thumbs the water from her cheek and – the gunshot is deafening – “Raleigh! Listen to me! Don’t –!” “–find me in the drift.” – Herc’s back slams into the wall, leaves a bloodied halo and – a hand clamps over his nose and mouth as – Herc’s hand on her shoulder makes her – swallow dirt. He can’t breathe. He can’t – “–scream if you want, pilot. No one will hear.”_

Raleigh snaps out of alignment, goes down on one knee, and an alarm goes off in in LOCCENT. The sortie dissolves, wrenching inside his head, hard left – _Yancy. Big brother, please… if you’re in there somewhere. Please…_ No. Panicking, he claws at the cervical jack in the back of the helmet. Get it out. Don’t chase it don’t –! _Thrashing, face down, fist in his hair. Breathe. Don’t scream. Fingers run down the split of his backside, down, down, down. Don’t puke. God. Don’t scream._

 

“Mako!” Tendo’s voice. “Mako, Raleigh’s way out! I’m shutting it down now –!”

“Yancy.” He can hear himself saying it out loud. “Yancy, God… please. I can’t.” He’s blind, the lights going out behind his eyes. “It really hurts.” Tokyo Reaction is gone. He can’t see. “Help me, please. Please. No. _No_. God, Yance, _please_ …”

 

_He’s on the floor in Tokyo._

 

_Grip on his neck, around his dick, dry and rough and pulling on him, knuckles scraping his inner thigh. Can hear his own heartbeat roaring in his skull, dull thumps of muscle against the dirty foam mat. Grunts, breath, hands – slick, dripping down his back, heard them snap open a bottle earlier – between his legs. They shove his face into the floor. Cuffs bite his wrists, bloodied slick. Feels himself getting hard in his rapist’s hand. Breathes through his nose, doesn’t scream._

_The fourth guy goes down on him. They pin him thrashing, knees spread, the man’s head between his thighs, bobbing up and down until his guts pulse with pain and the beginnings of another orgasm. The man between his legs slides two fingers slide into the clench of Raleigh’s asshole, works a third inside him and thrusts, once, twice, and Raleigh comes so hard, his whole body snaps into the orgasm. He bucks up into the man’s mouth, scream trapped in the clenched muscles of his throat. They force his knees even wider, until the muscles in his groin pull, and someone else climbs on top of him._

_They put their tongue in Raleigh’s mouth, warm and gluey. His erection is heavy against Raleigh’s stomach, the smell of him – sweat, spit, cheap deodorant. He grinds himself against Raleigh, holds him down, rocking the hard length of his cock into the juncture of Raleigh’s groin, groaning and that sound is burning it’s way into the izard core of his brain and – no, no no. The fifth guy – skull fucks him to the floor. He chokes and they tug on his hair encouragingly, his tongue dragging against skin. Tastes vomit, his own rectum. Retch. Swallow, throat working around the mass sliding in and out because someone has a blade to his inner thigh and they dig it in whenever he bares his teeth and he swallows again and –_

“Neural-handshake disengaged. Pilot-to-pilot connection terminated.”

 

Raleigh yanks his helmet off and pukes on the Conn-Pod floor.

 

Mako tears her helmet off and hurls it across the Conn-Pod, screams a single, mad, ear-piercing shriek. Then she is out of her rig, on his side of the Conn-Pod, yanking the cervical jack from the feedback cradle, dis-engaging the hydraulics from his armor. He falls out of the motion harness, doubles up and retches on his hands and knees, coughs until his head is splitting. His whole body shakes, seized like he’s freezing cold in the kiln of his drive-suit. Mako has her hand on the back of his neck, the other against his forehead, holding him steady. Everything hurts but the places she touches him, his skin aching, bones lit up from the marrow, Mako’s got her arms around him but his nervous system is on the floor of a warehouse in Tokyo. Don’t scream. She’s shouting through the comm for medical.

 

“I’m sorry!” She says something in Japanese, too fast for him. “I promised. I promised you and I – _なんとお詫びを申し上げてよいのやら_ _…_ _許して下さい_. Raleigh. Raleigh.”

 

Can’t scream. Throat’s still locked up. He chokes.

 

***

 

Raleigh says he’s fine, but he’s not. He doesn’t even try to convince her he’s fine and he doesn’t explain to the on-base psychologist what the nature of his R.A.B.I.T. was exactly but – here’s the thing – this has happened before. There is data, reels of it, because 46% of the pilots capable of Drifting and driving Jaegers (and 52% of all activated Jaeger pilots) are female and of that percentage one in five have a R.A.B.I.T. like this somewhere in the synaptic pathways of their brain. All pilots are required to take psychological exams and, you see, sexual assault is the leading psychological disqualifier for a Jaeger pilot.

 

It’s no wonder so many of them lie about it. And, really, there can still be worse memories to drag your co-pilot through and, really, it’s the end of the world as we know it. So if you can drive the titan then what does it matter the psychological artillery you are carrying if you can let it pass? The bottom-line is the same: Don’t chase it.

 

“I’m ready to try again.” It’s the first thing he says to her after being discharged from medical.

 

“No.”

 

“Why the fuck not?” Raleigh doesn’t swear that much so, when he does, it makes her skin prickle.

 

“Raleigh…”

 

He turns away from her, runs his hands over his face and back into his hair until he’s standing with his back to her, his hands knitted over the back of his neck like he’s trying to catch his breath from a sprint. She can feel how tired he is; it bleeds out of him and when she reaches out to touch his shoulder he says, “I’d forgotten all of that.” When he doesn’t go on, Mako puts her other hand on his arm and her heart splits its skin in her chest when he tenses under her touch.

 

“What can I do?”

 

“Get back in the Conn-Pod with me.”

 

“I will.”

 

“Now.”

 

“I cannot listen to you –“ She stops, bites her tongue until the shake is gone from her voice. His gaze is calm but behind the stillness of his face she can sense the fervor of desperation, like a fever burning off him in a malarial stink. Like something poison. “What are we going to do differently this time? To protect ourselves?”

 

“I won’t chase it this time.”

 

“It is not so simple.”

 

“It is that simple.”

 

“I am not leaving you. We will get back in that Conn-Pod and pilot. I am not afraid of your past, Raleigh Becket, so do not mistake my caution of cowardice. I am saying it is not so simple. We carried too much into the Drift –”

 

“And the only way to control it is to get back in the Drift and learn to manage it. Not hide and do system checks while the sons of bitches who shot Herc say they’re winning –”

 

The frantic peak toward which he is rapidly climbing is both hurtful and pointless. She stops him short by reaching up, brushing a hand against his cheek, and watching his eyes flicker when her skin skates across the plane of his cheek. He almost withstands it – the skyscraper tallness of him holding against the finger-brush pressure of her skin but, at the last second, his face tightens and gives way on itself. He turns his face away. She just lets her hand fall.

 

“It’s not so simple,” she says, hating every syllable as she says them.

 

Raleigh glares at her. His anger electrifies her skin, jumps off him like an arc and conducts itself into the network of her bloodstream. Then he’s gone. Walking away from her, pulling the collar of his jacket up as he puts distance between them. She’s certain – because for all their psychic turbulence, they are still ghosting – he’s going to go out on the helo-pad and stand in the monsoon rains until the burning in his belly and his bones is too much to stand. She doesn’t, however, know what he’ll do after that.

 

***

 

“I know the Shatterdome plumbing is terrible, but your disdain for a traditional shower is worrying some folks.”

 

Raleigh almost smiles. It tugs at the corner of his mouth, but there’s not enough genuine joy in the joke to pull it off, so he just huffs, shakes his head so the water flicks from his chin and Tendo thinks how sick he is of watching Raleigh Becket get the wind knocked out of him by the world. He also thinks how impossible it is for him to light a cigarette in the goddamn monsoon season.

 

It’s coming down in sheets. On the helo-deck overlooking the Hong Kong Harbor, the wind is beating the rain from the flaps of Raleigh’s overcoat, which is failing in its directive to keep the tall blonde Jaeger jockey from getting completely soaked. By the time Tendo gets across the deck, Raleigh has likely been out here for the better part of an hour, leaning centimeter by centimeter farther over the guardrail he’s hanging onto. He’s still hanging onto it, even as Tendo is delivering his best in cavalier conversation openers and from his angle at Raleigh’s side Tendo can see the white of the bone in his knuckles, can imagine the incredible pressure he is exerting against the metal.

 

“Just thinking,” says Raleigh at last.

 

“Staring dramatically into the fucking wind and rain is conducive to thinking?”

 

“It’s conducive to _not_ thinking.”

 

“Really conducive to not talking.”

 

“Talking is overrated.”

 

“Agreed. So let’s not talk about the thing you’re not thinking about?”

 

“How’s Herc?”

 

Tendo really wants that cigarette. “He’s the same. Mako’s with him. Armed guard. The whole kit and caboodle. Doctors still say it’s too early to tell.”

 

“How is this happening?” Tendo looks up at Raleigh, blinking like he doesn’t understand the question. Rals isn’t looking at him though, he’s staring out into the rolling gray of the sea beyond the harbor. “No, I mean it. How is this what happens after we close the breach? How does the world turn on us so fast?”

 

“It hasn’t. The world is furious. I can’t name the number of taskforces trying to hunt these guys down. The President of the United States is taking a personal goddamn interest and I shit you not the Chinese Prime Minister is right up there with him. Not to be grim, but the best unifier we’ve has since the Kaiju is the Blue Blood Network trying to take out Herc.”

 

“Yeah, and when word gets out I can’t pilot Tokyo Reaction? What kind of effect is that going to have?”

 

Tendo inclines his head. “Raleigh, if you think there is anything at all that you, of all people, still have to prove then you’re crazy. Man, you know you saved the world right? You’re one half of the Dynamic Duo, kiddo. Like it or not you could get away with murder.” When Raleigh continues to stand there, staring straight forward into the downpour, Tendo elbows him. “Hey, Raleigh. I’m serious. The world does not hinge on you getting back in that Conn-Pod. You’re an idiot and you’re going to do it anyway, because you’re a living badass or whatever, but no one is expecting you guys to pay hero this time. You get that right?”

 

“Playing hero isn’t what I’m doing, Tendo.”

 

“Then what is it?”

 

“I don’t want them to win.”

 

“They aren’t winning, Raleigh. They’ve got every major power in the word hunting them down for crimes against humanity. They classified a post-war PPDC attack the same way as a pre-Breach closure war crime. That’s how angry people are. Where ever these guys are, we’re gonna hunt them down and everything they’ve ever done in the name of their bullshit gods is going get blown into the open. They don’t win here, Rals. They already lost – Whoa! Raleigh, Christ, are you okay?”

 

Raleigh tries to stand up straight, but another violent wrenching dry heave doubles him up again and he stands there bent at the waist gagging up nothing. Tendo gets as far as touching his shoulder, but Raleigh jerks out from under his hand and, in that moment as the spasm passes, Tendo Choi starts to wonder how much the human mind can take. He wonders if the totality if Raleigh’s mental history has stacked too high. The sum of his time in the Drift – is this what it looks like after the fact? A fissure splitting through the interior of his head until the monsters come crawling though.

 

“Raleigh?”

 

“I’m okay.”

 

“Talk to me, buddy. I’m lost here.”

 

“It’s the Drift,” says Raleigh and Tendo can’t remember hearing this guy’s voice shake this like, a continental shudder that’s in every muscle sinew and syllable. “I can’t shake the memories. I’m dragging Mako down. I dragged her in there with me. Jesus. I dragged her into it with me…”

 

“Mako Mori isn’t a woman you drag into anything, Raleigh. C’mon. We’re going inside.”

 

His grip on Tendo’s jacket, fisting suddenly at his collar, is so tight it wrings water from the fabric.

 

“C’mon, Raleigh. You’re okay. You’re fine.”

 

“I’m glad he’s gone,” says Raleigh raggedly.

 

“What?”

 

“Yancy.” Tendo _stares_. “I’m glad he’s gone. I’m glad he’s not in my head for this.”

 

The rain in Hong Kong does not let up for anything and it doesn’t let up now. The monsoon seemingly endless, beating at the metal hull of the Shatterdome. Tendo has nothing he can say. He just closes his hand over Raleigh’s knuckles and keeps it there until his grip relaxes. Five years ago, wearing his dead brother’s clothes, Raleigh Becket got in a fucked up old pick-up and drove off alone to die on the Wall of Life somewhere. This time, Tendo gets Raleigh back to his room and waits outside until he’s sure the kid is in the shower and only then does he allow himself to stop praying.

 

***

 

Mako Mori has crazy eyes again and she won’t be relinquishing them any time soon. The medical staff has seen her too many time now to protest her after hours presence, to protest her vigil at the Marshall’s bedside, because when she looks up at them – _“Please, Miss Mori, it’s late. You should get some sleep_.” – there’s two thousand tons of radioactive metal behind her eyes; there’s a burning alien sky in her stare, there’s the sound of the comm line going dead at the bottom of the ocean.

They leave her alone. The night nurse brings her a food tray with crackers and soup.

 

Herc’s hand between hers is deceptively warm, dry and creased with callouses and overlain with scars. The lines of first-gen circuitry suits run faded tracks up the under-side of his right arm where Lucky Seven’s sensor grid blew out and overloaded on his second deployment and he had to fight while his skin blistered and burned and, she knows, when Stacker used to say ‘ _The Mark I glory days.’_ what he was talking about was the suicide runs – chemical burns, choking through your respirator, your motor relays locking mid-sortie, fighting until you pass out in your rigging.

 

She remembers Herc and Stacker talking…

 

_“Shite smelt like burnt plastic. If you didn’t end a fight in the first five minutes, the fumes would take you out before the Kaiju.”_

_“S’why we did so many multi-Jaeger deployments. If there were six gen-1 pilots in the field, odds were at least two would go down with some kind of equipment problem. We used to time it so the first two Jaegers would double-team, then send in the finisher team when they had to pull back ‘cause of technical difficulties.”_

_“Go ‘till ya break somethin’.”_

_“Aye.”_

 

Mako Mori knows hospitals. She knows sheets pressed white and starchy. She knows the chemical clean and the florescent overheads and how healthy people look sick under their glow. Tamsin used to tell her it wasn’t the cancer that was killing her, it was the goddamn hospital lights.

 

When Mako was sixteen, she stole Stacker’s car, broke Tamsin out of her ward and drove her to the sea for a day. The most vivid memory Mako has of her big sister is the sun glowing orange off her bare shoulders, how the sunshine lit her up and the halo of gold surrounding her and, oh, Mako has always known that Tamsin was there with Stacker that day in Tokyo, but it’s not until that day in the sea that she can see Tamsin as she should have been: her skin knitted with sunshine.

 

Mako thinks, if she could just get some sunshine in here…

 

“Mako, do you need anything?” The night-nurse stands behind her, a clipboard in her hands.

 

“No. Thank you, Fei Yen.”

 

“He’s looking better,” says Fei Yen gently.

 

“It’s these lights,” says Mako quietly. Herc’s hand in hers seems cooler than it’s been, or maybe she’s just burning too hot – she can’t seem to cool down anymore. She feels five-hundred degrees Fahrenheit all the time. “I can’t tell in these lights.”

 

Fei Yen leaves Mako alone and closes the door behind her.

 

Hercules Hansen is a man Mako remembers from her childhood as a man she mostly didn’t understand. He spoke too lazily, his words not quite the same English as Stacker’s. He swore too often, said too little, and what little he said ran together. She was too young back then to grasp an Australian accent and just assumed the man was speaking another language entirely. She has a very distinct memory of trying to teach him the proper word for sandwich and him laughing into his grilled cheese while Chuck scowled.

 

“Sandwich,” she says. She doesn’t recognize her own voice in the quiet. “You say it ‘sand-witch’.”

 

She thought she’d avoided this. That’s the problem. How much of her teen life has she spent bracing for the second round – for Stacker’s turn in the chemo-therapy ward? How like a swallowed razor was her relief when she thought, one night, her knuckles split against her bathroom wall, _‘At least he died quickly. At least there was no pain. At least he died as he chose.’_

 

It’s not fair.

 

It’s not fair that she is here again. How many times will she watch her family die?

 

“Don’t go.” Herc’s face is still, like he’s sleeping. “Please don’t go.” Mako kisses his knuckles, tastes her own tears and says, “Who will remember them? I forget Chuck’s smile. I don’t remember her face anymore, Herc. I _forget_. I am not big enough to carry them all. I cannot carry you too. Please, Raleigh… _Raleigh_.” His name makes her throat clench and ache. “I don’t know how to carry another person inside me like this.”

 

Mako can still hear the rain outside, endless thunder.

 

“How do you carry another person’s wounds?” She switches to Japanese, but her tongue still hurts speaking the words. “ _I can feel everything. I remember everything they did to him. I remember every moment. I can’t forget Raleigh screaming. How do I remember these things but I can’t remember Chuck’s smile? There is not enough room inside me for everything. I thought I could always find my sensei in the Drift but there is nothing there now. I can’t remember Chuck smiling.”_ She is crying. “I can’t remember Chuck smiling.”

 

“S’cuz he didn’t smile.”

 

Mako’s heart – it stutters in her chest.

 

“He _smirked_.” His hand tightens around hers. “Ya remember?”

 

She remembers. Hugging Hercules is not very much like hugging Stacker. He’s just not quite as big and his hand on her head is the wrong shape, but for the moment where she buries her face in his shoulder and breathes in the smell of Mark-I relay gel and skin – Mako Mori remembers.

 

 

_tbc_


End file.
